":% 



^ :: f '' ^ -^ 






V °^'*'li^> ^v 









¥.:^ 



.#^ V 



.,0 ^ , X "* 






^^ 






\ V ft o 






^ . ^ '' 









^ -^^ 




%^^^: 



-OqX ^-.v..^^^ 



>-tS' 






4 -t, ^ K 









.<i^ ^. 







^, o. 



^S ^ >€ 1 7 . 



- .^ 



iV <^,- 






-^ 
^ 






o> s^ '_■■ '/, O 



% .N^^- 



-'f.-o .,-v 



i^ 



^ .«^ 

















"^.//* 



t,'^^^. 



-^- 



\. ' 



■\ 



-0> . " ^ '■ « "% 



.O" 






V^ '' .^ 




x^<< 



S ' * / . -^: 







')k- 



<f- 



'\^ .^^ ^ 



x^' ^. 



^w^^ 






.^^ 



THE SPIRIT IN MAN 

SERMONS AND SELECTIONS 



NEW REVISED EDITION 
OF DR. BUSHNELL'S WORKS 



The Spirit in Man : Sermons and Selections. 

(New Volume.) 12mo $1.25, net 

Sermons 

Sermons for the New Life. (New Plates.) . $1.25, net 
Sermons on Christ and His Salvation . . . $1.25, net 
Sermons on Living Subjects $1.25, net 

Theological Writings 

Christian Nurture $1.25, net 

God in Christ $1.25, net 

Nature and the Supernatural. (New Plates.) $1,25, net 
The Vicarious Sacrifice. Two Volumes . . $2.50, net 
The Character of Jesus 60 cents, 7iet 

Literary Varieties 

I. Work and Play. (New Plates.) . . . $1.25, net 
n. Moral Uses of Dark Things .... $1.25, net 
in. Building Eras $1.25, net 



Life and Letters of Horace Bushnell. With 

Portraits and Views. (New Edition. ) 8vo $3.00 



THE SPIRIT IN MAN 



SERMONS AND SELECTIONS 



BY 

HOEAOE BUSHNELL 

u 



" But there is a spirit in man, and the inspiration of 
the Almighty giveth them understanding."— Job xxxii. 8. 



Centenary BMtlon 



NEW YOEK 

CHAELES SCKIBNEKS SONS 

1903 



•i^'-' 



THE LIBRARY OF 
CONGRESS, 

Two Copies. Received 

APR 22 1 903 

Copyright Entry 
cuss (ju XXc. N< 



No. 



:i 



n'Tk 



Copyright, 1903, by 
MARY BUSHNELL CHENEY 

Published, May, 1903 



i*^ 



(\V 



LC Control Number 




tmp96 028047 



: PREFACE 

HoEACE BusHNELL was bom in 1802 and died 
r in 1876. It is, therefore, now one hundred years 

xj since his birth, and twenty-six years since he left 

this world. It is, perhaps, not more remarkable 
that a personal influence which had its root in an- 
other century should be still growing and spread- 
ing, than that material of thought produced from 
thirty to sixty years ago should still have fitness to 
the thought of to-day, and show equal freshness 
and vitality. The papers offered in this collection 
are selected from those left in the care of his wife, 
and which have lain inert for more than thirty 
years, with the single exception as to time of that 
on " Inspiration,'' begun just a year before his 
death under conditions of feebleness best described 
by himself in his introduction to it. The title of 
the book is appropriated from one of his sermons 
in the volume of " Sermons for the E'ew Life " 
(page 29), chosen because he once chose it, and be- 
cause it covers the whole scope of the subjects in- 
cluded as well as any one title could do. 

These sermons, it will appear, have never had the 
benefit of his revision. The needful work had to 
be done by another hand. Omissions were neces- 
sary, and have been freely made, but not always 



VI PREFACE 

indicated. Even more important corrections have 
been attempted, under a sense of no restraint except 
that of obedience to the well-known laws and habits 
of his mind and a constant mental reference to his 
probable wishes. 

The brief extracts and pithy sayings, collected 
from his published writings and here, for want of 
a better name, entitled " Aphorisms," were never 
intended by Dr. Bushnell to stand" thus separated 
from their context. They undoubtedly lose some- 
thing of their meaning in the violent uprooting, and 
also suffer by being placed in close company with 
thoughts not allied to them, so many and each so 
strong that they must needs struggle for the mas- 
tery in the mind of the reader. Yet nothing could 
better illustrate the vigor and rugged force, com- 
bined with insight and profound religious feeling, 
which were the characteristics of the writer. Noth- 
ing was farther from his own purpose, however, 
than to make such a demonstration, for, in spite 
of his known self-confidence, he was singularly 
free from intellectual vanity. For these, then, the 
editor must assume all the responsibility of pub- 
lication, except such as may be accepted by her ad- 
visers, and leave the utterances of his whole life to 
balance by their absolute conviction of holiness 
what may seem in their publication here to proceed 
from a lower stand-point. 

In regard to the extracts from sermons, it will 
be evident that selection from them has not been 
controlled by the purpose to preserve intact the ar- 
gument and method of the whole discourse. Only 



PREFACE Vli 

those parts were clioseii which were most instinct 
with life, and were^ therefore, most likely to meet 
the interest and need of the reader. Such a choice 
was, of course, incompatible with system. These 
things are said, not in apology for the material itself, 
but as explaining the difficulties encountered in se- 
lection where the master hand is wanting. Still 
greater is the difficulty in welding together parts 
that were separate in the original manuscripts, and 
this difficulty amounts frequently to an impossi- 
bility, causing here and there a hiatus which will 
be obvious enough to the reader, and will carry its 
own explanation with it. 

Maky Bushnell Cheney, 

Editor. 

September, 1902. 



CONTENTS 



PART I 

PAGE 

Inspiration by the Holy Spirit .... 1 



PART II 
SEKMONS 

L Christ the Form op the Soul . . .39 
II. Unconscious Prophecy . . . . .53 

III. God's Thoughts Fit Bread for Children . 70 

IV. A Great Life Begins Early . . .90 
V. Our Best Weapons Gotten by Conquest . 103 

VI. A Week-day Sermon to the Business Men 



OF Hartford . . , , 
VII, Prosperity Our Duty 
VIII. Reverses Needed .... 
IX. Personality Developed by Religion 
X. The Finite Demands the Infinite 
XI. God Preparing the State of Glory 



120 
135 
159 
185 
199 
214 



X CONTENTS 

PART III 
SELECTIONS FROM SERMONS 

PAGE 

Hearing and Doing 231 

The Eternity of Love 240 

The Motions of Sins 246 

Deliverance in Christ 257 

The Word Grace Revived 262 

The Doctrine of Prayer 271 

The Meaning of the Supper 277 

Death a Leveller of Distinctions . . .281 

Death Abolished 284 

God's Meaning in Probation 288 

The Great Time-keeper 301 

The Fortified State 311 

Spiritual Things the Only Solid . . . .324 
The Preparations of Eternity . . . .331 

God's One Family • 341 

Existence Consummated in a State of Praise . 345 

Revelation 357 

Obligation Imperative ■ . 360 

Human Personality 362 

God's Call to Decision 364 

God's Ways Discoverable to Piety • • . 364 
Morality and Religion ...... 366 



CONTENTS 



XI 



The War of Our Desires 
The Small Saints that are No Saints 
The Connections of Prayer . 
Special Prayer . . . . . 
Half Converted . . . . . 
The Good Wine Last 



PAGE 

367 
370 
371 
373 
375 
377 



PART IV 
MISCELLANIES 

A Marriage Ceremony 385 

A Group of Letters 388 

Aphorisms Selected from Published Writings . 403 

Bibliography : 

Part I. The Writings of Horace Bushnell . . 445 

" 11. Controversial Writings Addressed to or 

Written Concerning Horace Bushnell 463 

** III. Selected References to Horace Bushnell 

in Books and Periodicals . , , 469 



PART I 

INSPIRATION BY THE HOLY SPIRIT 



INSPIRATION BY THE HOLY 
SPIRIT 

Introduction 

I begin this day, January 22, 1875, a tract or 
treatise on the Holy Spirit and his work which I 
have long been desiring to prepare, but have been 
detained formerly by other engagements, and of 
late by advanced age and the growing incapacity of 
disease. It does not seem to me that I can ever 
fully execute so heavy a work, but I can begin it, 
and God will permit me to go on or stop me short 
in it when he pleases; and to him I gladly submit 
the result. Only, considering how much of divine 
insight will be needed to speak worthily of a sub- 
ject so interior and deep and so far removed from 
the mere natural intelligence of men, I invoke most 
earnestly his constant presence with me and the 
steady oversight of his counsel. Help me, O Eter- 
nal Spirit, whose ways I am engaged to interpret, 
to be in the sense at all times of thy pure teaching 
and to speak of what thou givest me to presently 
know! 

Seeing that I have no strength left to be ex- 
pended on superfluities, and scarcely enough to serve 
my present necessities, I make engagement with 

3 



4 INSPIRATION BY THE HOLY SPIRIT 

myself not to be overexacting in my attention to 
matters of form and rhetorical finish. It must be 
sufiicient for the matter of style that I represent 
my glorious Friend, the Holy Spirit, according to 
the practical truth of his relationship. The mind 
of the Spirit is to be my law, as it is my subject. 

In case my work is cut short, which is by no 
means improbable, I submit the manuscript of what 
is written to the discretion of competent judges. If 
only a little is done it will of course be suppressed 
as by the judgment of Providence. If it is carried 
far enough toward completion to show the general 
argument, or to give indications of a general treat- 
ment that would probably have a degree of fresh- 
ness and practical benefit, that may be a judgment 
of Providence favoring its preservation. At this 
point I pass directly on to my work, proposing no 
analysis or plan, but simply to let it plan itself as 
the rivers do when they mark their courses by their 
own movement. I make no distribution of parts 
and capita or chapters, but write on in the easy, 
meandering way, cutting up the strips of product 
as I proceed into segments or sections at my con- 
venience. I prefer to have my liberty, and espe- 
cially not to be worried if I sometimes fall into that 
which is the old man's liberty, better called his in- 
firmity, of repeating what he has said before. At 
present I hope I may not do it, but I am going on 
adventure somewhat, and may pass into regions of 
mental oblivion before I know it. 



DIVISIONS OF THE SUBJECT 

I. Inspieability. 
II. Peesonality of the Spirit. 

III. By the Spirit God Communicates Himself. 

IV. Promise of the Spirit as Paraclete. 
V. The Inaugural of the Spirit. 

VI. A few pages of Section VI., which was added 
later, with the title: "Ways and Modes of 
the Spirit." 



INSPIRATION BY THE HOLY SPIRIT 



I. Inspieability 

Insplrableness, or the faculty of inspiration, is 
the supreme faculty of man. It is the faculty of 
being permeated or interiorly and receptively vis- 
ited by the higher nature of God, comimunicating 
somewhat of his own quality. A window-pane is 
permeable by the light, but having no receptive 
quality it retains nothing. The whole body of nat- 
ural substance in what is called the creation is per- 
meable by the divine omnipresence or the all-ruling 
Spirit of God, but this mere going through of power 
lodges no quality where it goes, save that so much 
of inert substance is thereby modulated in terms of 
counsel and constituent harmony. The permeating 
Spirit of God, as Holy Spirit, is a different matter. 
"We call it inspiration, because it inbreathes some- 
thing of a divine quality and configures the subject 
in some way to itself. The sun has been shooting 
its beams for many thousands of years through the 
illimitable spaces of the sky and has not raised their 
heat even by a degree, because it has not encoun- 
tered anything there that has a receptivity for heat. 
Whereas the beams of the Holy Spirit shine to be- 
get heat, and to lodge a divine property in moral 
natures that is akin to itself. Job saw a great many 
things long ages ago that were never taught him 
save by his own self-discovery, and this, I think, 
was one: '^ There is a spirit in man; and the inspira- 
tion of the Almighty giveth them understanding." 
There was never a conception of man and of the 



'8 INSPIRATION BY THE HOLY SPIRIT 

Holy Spirit as related to man that was more exact 
or more complete. (1) The spirit in man is spirit 
not a solid too impenetrable, or a vapor too fugitive 
to be taken possession of, but a grand receptivity of 
life. And then (2) the Spirit of the Almighty is 
like to it, to be inbreathed and interfused, and to 
make internal lodgement in it of his divine proper- 
ties. Which is called (3) the " giving understand- 
ing.'' That is, wisdom is given, and good and great 
thoughts, and love and truth and energy — a nature, 
in short, so contempered to God and conformed to 
his counsel as to have a natural and free working 
with his. Man was made for this^ from this sin took 
him away, and the Holy Spirit as a quickening and 
regenerative force is to beget him anew, and make 
his life a recovered inspiration, fuller and wiser and 
more indestructible than it could have been but for 
the double experience passed through. 

It is hardly necessary to say again that this fac- 
ulty of inspiration is the summit of our human nat- 
ure. By it we have or may have the inhabitation 
of God. In a sense, God inhabits the world, and 
as we just now said turns all the mechanical powers 
and substances of things to work in harmony with 
his plan; but in this inhabitation of his Spirit he 
temples himself socially and morally in our human 
nature, working it responsively toward himself, im- 
parting his own thought and the very habit in which 
he lives. In the completest and truly inmost sense, 
without putting any strain upon the figure, he makes 
us partakers of his divine nature. It really seems 
impossible that any human creature, however dulled 



INSPIEATION BY THE HOLY SPIRIT 9 

or besotted by sin^ should be inattentive to so great 
opportunity, undesiring or unexpectant of an honor 
and footing of life so transcendent. O, what other 
promontory that we pass over is fanned by such 
breezes of health and life-invigorating purity! 

II. Personality of the Spirit 

In the communication to us or lodgement in us 
of personal qualities, the supposition is involved that 
the Holy Spirit is a person. He cannot ingenerate 
or inbreathe sentiments that are personal, affections 
that put us in social and reciprocal relation with 
God, confidences that belong to a personal faith in 
God, if he be not himself a person. He might be 
Spirit to us in a certain pantheistic way, as when 
God is conceived to be the eternal run of causes; 
and might be just as really operative in what part 
of our nature belongs to the sphere of causes as he 
is to all mere things in the domain of nature, that 
is, no-wise operative save as all unintelligence may 
be; but he cannot waken love answering to love, 
nor move any sentiment that is to have society with 
sentiment in himself. In order to this he must be 
a person; for without personality the thing is in- 
conceivable or even impossible. That class of teach- 
ers who reject the Trinity very commonly resolve 
the Holy Spirit into a mere influence; and another 
class, who do not reject the Trinity but are over- 
intent on saving the integrity of the will, that it 
may seem not to be taken away by the irruption of 
the Spirit in his converting efficacy, call him also 



10 IlSrSPIRATION BY THE HOLY SPIEIT 

an influence, denying that he ever operates save as 
by influence. But if we insist on reducing his work 
to a mere influence, supposing no direct agency of 
personal will, how is he to refashion the per- 
sonal sentiments, as in regeneration, and set us chim- 
ing with God in the closest adaptations of character 
and the most intricate subtleties of his personal 
nature? A carpenter makes a tight joint by making 
it, and not by an influence on the timber. In like 
manner a power that can inwardly configure a soul 
to God, and conjoin it by living adaptations with his 
inmost nature, must be divinely personal itself, 
working more directly and less vaguely than by any 
mere influence. 

But there is another and different kind of mistake 
at this point in over-asserting the personality. In 
preaching the Holy Spirit, a great many have it as 
their first point to insist on his personality, which, 
having duly established, they assume it in their sim- 
plicity to mean that he is, more humano, personal; so 
that when they meet the scripture figures of the 
Spirit, they assert and use them with a most unques- 
tioning emphasis of literality which robs them of 
their true value, and throws them into a confused 
medley that is virtual distraction. How large a part 
of the disciples of our time are incommoded by this 
kind of distraction, I do not know. 

Thus we have given us for epithets or instrumen- 
tal conceptions of the Spirit the terms : " sent, sent 
down, poured out, descends, comes, withdraws, de- 
parts, present, absent, taken away, restored." In- 
deed, we can hardly pretend to recite the whole roll 



INSPIRATION BY THE HOLY SPIRIT H 

of the Scripture words and phrases thus applied, only 
never applied save in the tacit assumption of their 
figurative nature and their need of attentive quali- 
fication. The Holy Spirit is a person only in the 
sense that the Father and the Word are persons. 
Omnipresence is predicable of him as of them. But 
the epithets just recited suppose, every one of them 
in the list as far as the natural form is concerned, a 
lack of omnipresence. For it will be seen when the 
eye is run over the list that they are all words which 
imply motion in space, and a nature of course that 
does not measure space save by motion in it. They 
do not signify a being omnipresent or infinite. And 
yet they are all the better, if we can so understand, 
in that they handle truths concerning the Spirit by 
instrumentations of language that are finite. Thus 
when it is said that the Spirit is sent or sent down, 
the truth signified is not that he was locally absent 
or that he comes in a horizontal or a downward 
motion, but only that being inherently and always 
present he comes into a mode of power or of felt 
action. And then the word " sent " has another 
value, viz., that the Spirit is not conceived as omni- 
presence, beginning from itself to act, but as be- 
ginning from the Father and the Son, showing the 
whole circle of constitutive and redemptive agency 
concurrent. A great many persons indulge what 
they suppose to be their wit on these terminologies 
of Scripture language, asking how many Gods there 
are in the personal three of trinity? If the Holy 
Spirit is poured out, from what vessel, by what 
hand? If he comes down, why he might not as well 



12 INSPIRATION BY THE HOLY SPIRIT 

have come up? Probably some really serious dis- 
clear their way. But the discovery should not be 
ciples get tangled in this net and know not how to 
difficult that these figures of Scripture have an over- 
plus of form besides the meaning, as all figures have, 
which overplus after it has served as vehicle for 
the meaning is then to be held of no account. So 
taken, they serve the uses of intelligence and cum- 
ber its processes by no distractions caused by residues 
of form that cannot be reduced. Thus when a man 
can pray: " Send down thy power," " Pour out thy 
Spirit," " Breathe upon us, O Breath," " Blow upon 
us, O Wind," " Come and be present with us," 
" Leave us not afar off," ^' Return upon us. Holy 
One of God," knowing perfectly that these lines of 
motion in space have nothing to do with his prayer 
save as machineries of language, how greatly is he 
helped in his endeavo:^ and how perfectly clear of 
distraction is he! But suppose that, dropping out 
all these instrumentations, he were to begin at the 
omnipresence of the Spirit and word a prayer for 
these same gifts or bestowments, how very soon will 
he be instructed as to their necessity? " Come 
down " — i^o, that certainly is not what is wanted. 
" Draw near " — I^o, he is near enough already. 
*' Grrant us thy presence" — E'o, we have his presence 
before we ask it. " Eeturn, O thou departed " — 
'No, we must not ask it, for he is not departed. And 
so the prayer that was going to be worded without 
these finite epithets and figures fails and leaves us 
dumb, just because we have no vehicle. But how 
beautiful and simple and almost wonderful in the 



INSPIRATION BY THE HOLY SPIRIT. 13 

wisdom of its machinery is tlie prayer that can be 
wise enough to lay hold of the figures that are given, 
and use them as they are meant; for they are not 
meant to set the Spirit moving in space according 
to their forms, but simply to obtain a consciousness 
of his presence, who before was unconsciously or less 
consciously present. 

III. By the Spirit God Communicates Himself 

"We may assume it without rashness to be the su- 
preme object of God as the creator and governor 
of men to bestow himself upon them or be inwardly 
communicated to them. For this men are constitu- 
ently made, even as an eye is made for the light. 
In a certain first view of things, observing chiefly 
the bounties of the world, one might guess that God's 
prime object here is the preparing of growths and 
fruitages that will grow men, growing animals for 
their sake; but in deeper second thought it will be 
seen that he is building and ruling for mind, to make 
himself the light of intelligence, the friend of guid- 
ance, the supreme joy of love. Physical production 
plainly enough is no main purpose with him. He 
glasses himself on every side in objects and forms 
related to mind. By music and fragrance and color 
he wakens the sense of his beauty. By unnumbered 
and persistent ways of discipline he trains experi- 
mentally to the knowledge of himself. So far, in 
things without, self-communication visibly engages 
him. To which, inwardly correspondent, we have the 
all-permeating Spirit engaged to fulfil the self-corn- 



14: INSPIRATION BY THE HOLY SPIRIT 

"municating purpose and become, what that purpose 
implies, a universal inspiration. What else or less 
can he be, as a Spirit omnipresent in all God's dis- 
positions ? As he is a universal Spirit, he must have a 
universal working. Gravity in matter can as well 
keep itself back and refuse to be more than a half 
principle, ruling it by half a law. The Holy Spirit 
carries the heart of God with him, and the heart 
of God is miiversal. To say that he ministers the 
love of God puts him in a like paternal relation to 
all mind, even as gravity to all matter. 

So we reason, but where is the fact? someone 
will answer. Of course it will not be understood, 
when I speak in this unrestricted manner, that I 
imagine no kind of limitation such as will accord 
with the facts of observation. The term inspira- 
tion has been largely used in past times — almost 
solely applied — to denote a certain special infalli- 
bility in the Scripture writings and writers. That 
particular kind of inspiration, it is generally admit- 
ted, has fallen upon no niortal of the race for an 
almost geologic era — a subject that will be discussed 
at a future stage in my argument. I only suggest 
here that inspirable conditions are sometimes want- 
ing or uninspirable conditions present, by which the 
ranges of inspiraion are partially restricted. The 
universal inspiration of which I wished to speak is 
that which is grounded or supposed in the natural 
relation of God to souls; that which Job affirms, with 
a great deal more, when he says : " Tor there is a 
spirit in man; the inspiration of the Almighty giveth 
them understanding." By this we are to under- 



INSPIRATION BY THE HOLY SPIRIT 15 

stand, first, a nutritive inspiration that unfolds the 
natural and moral powers, and secondly, a correct- 
ive inspiration. The former is absolute, entering 
without leave into all the growths of sentiment and 
intelligence. The latter is distinguishable in two 
degrees, either as act or as fact. As act, it is to God 
the permeation of his will in corrective and restor- 
ative impulse, while to the subject it is either a grace 
unobserved, or a grace resisted, or a grace accepted 
in true welcome. Wherein it becomes a grace as 
in fact, having found true lodgement and become 
the seed of a true character, a living, everlasting in- 
spiration. This inspiration of fact is a great deal 
more, it will be seen, than a mere intromission of 
God, as in act; adding to the kind first-named the 
nutritive inspiration^ what respects both character 
and the staple of the man, what is grown in him or 
what he grows to be in the scope of his intelligence, 
the health of his moral sentiments, the beauty of his 
disposition, the generosity of his temperament. 
Baising these distinctions of inspiration, it will not 
be surprising or extravagant to anyone that I assert 
the doctrine of a universal inspiration ; for there will 
be room enough after that for any kind of denial 
that will seem necessary to be made. 

It is a pleasant evidence, here to be cited, that Mr. 
Emerson appears to come as near asserting the fact 
of a universal inspiration as he well can under his 
particular mode of conceiving such kind of subjects. 
I refer to his chapter entitled '^ The Oversoul," 
where he reports and represents the true inspiration 
better than he does in most of his writings. By the 



16 INSPIRATION BY THE HOLY SPIRIT 

Oversoul, he means in fact the Holy Spirit, writing 
as one who is captivated by the beauty of his char- 
acter and office. He conceives him to be a kind of 
all-infolding Soul, coromunicating God and life to 
man and filling the office of an all-cherishing all- 
correcting nurture in the race. He has no ques- 
tions to raise concerning the universality of the con- 
ception. Its beauty proves it, he would say, to be 
true. 

At this point two particular facts ask as it were 
to be named, which as far as I know are never 
connected with the doctrine of the Spirit at all. I 
speak of his inspirations in the time of infancy, and 
in times of lapsed consciousness in the dying. In- 
fancy has no Bible, no language, no capacity for a 
time of representative instruction. All the form- 
world of the mind is vacant or empty. But it is a 
world open to the Spirit and the dear inspirations of 
God, where, going through as living bible in the 
sweet effusions of love and gentleness, he may lodge 
all most beautiful germs of character, probably 
sometimes never to be effaced. He is completely 
beforehand here; milk before the mother's, we may 
almost say; counsel infused before counsel given. 
Hence the wondrous and almost divine beauty of 
childish unconsciousness and guilelessness. It is the 
sole gift and grace of the spirit. We call it angelic, 
finding flavors in it that we cannot impute to any 
purest motherhood, or to anything but some celestial 
nutrition. 

When the Spirit helps the dying it is in a differ- 
ent manner, but sometimes in a manner scarcely less 



INSPIRATION BY THE HOLY SPIRIT 17 

affecting. He has carried the soldier through his 
war, and now he sleeps. For whole hours or pos- 
sibly days he has been wholly unconscious and 
speechless. Is he alone ? or is his divine friend with 
him? How very often are we permitted to see! 
As, when he opens suddenly his eyes to say, look- 
ing up and round: " Beautiful angels," " Lord Je- 
sus, I come," " The gates, thank God, are open," 
" Good-by all." What is it now that puts it in the 
soul, shut up for so many hours in the supineness 
of a block, to break out thus perceptibly into second 
life and a second world, unless it be the Spirit of 
God, who has finished his charge and is by, as the 
second world's Lord also, to open the gates and usher 
him in? As he came to the infant, bible before 
Bible, so here he comes to the servant lapsing in 
death as a bible revelation within when the word 
without is gone by, to put him on thoughts not 
spoken outwardly, and to open discoveries that can 
be witnessed only by their own light. 

TV, Promise of the Spieit as Paeaclete 

Just before the departure of Christ from the 
world, when gathering in his ministry for the close, 
he added a chapter promising a kind of new begin- 
ning to be inaugurated shortly before his departure, 
and to be carried on by a different executive agency. 
It is to be a dispensation of the Spirit called by the 
special name, Paraclete, a name designed to suggest 
his more official connection with the new economy 
now organized, to replace the old in which as Spirit 



18 INSPIRATION BY THE HOLY SPIRIT 

he had hitherto held a less conspicuous place. This 
Greek name, Paraclete, is badly translated in our 
English version by the name Comforter.* Not that 
he is never a dispenser of comfort, but that this is 
never distinctively his office. The two elements of 
the word. Para and Clete — E"ear and Caller — are 
probably to have a meaning that is cast in that 
mould, indicating that the Spirit will have it for his 
office to call or draw or bring men to the new 
salvation provided. If the name Paraclete were 
translated Inductor, it would probably be as closely 
represented in the name as it well can be in English. 
It is not the conception of Christ that the Holy 
Spirit as Paraclete is a new agent or a new fact 
promised. That kind of interpretation is one that 
is possible only to a certain want of culture. It im- 
agines in fact that a new God or new Divine Per- 
son is now sent to undertake the world — a conclu- 
sion that will not be readily accepted. He comes, 
it is true, by promise, and so far there is an air of 
newness; but the newness consists in the fact that 
he before was more especially the illuminator of 
prophets and the counsellor and guide of magis- 
trates, imparting a divine energy and capacity to the 
institutional men of the state or state church ; where- 
as he is now to be, and be understood as appointed 
to be, the monitor and quickener of souls, dispensing 
to them life and salvation from the world's Messiah. 
That is, he drops out his more peculiar charge in 
the old semi-political economy, and takes up a charge 

* The whole passage concerning the Comforter, John xvi. 7-14, 
is fully discussed in Part I., chapter 3, of my Vicarious Sacrifice, 
vol. 1. 



INSPIRATION BY THE HOLY SPIRIT 19 

that is more personal and experimental, and respects 
the propagation of life in all the people of mankind. 
We distinguish in the form of the promise two 
points that Christ appears to have in mind, as points 
of advantage now to be served by the Spirit. Thus 
he tells his disciples, giving it as the occasion for a 
new administration, that the time has now come 
when the cause he is in will be more easily advanced 
if he, himself, retires. And he speaks in a way 
which shows that he is apprehending no mere fatal- 
ity such as may befall him at the hands of his ene- 
mies, but is thinking rather of some prior condi- 
tion that even requires him to be removed. " I tell 
you the truth, it is expedient for you that I go 
away." And if we begin to ask, why expedient 
and how? it is not difficult, I think, to hit upon the 
answer. Such a ministry as that of Christ in the 
world plainly enough could not be perpetual, or be 
continued for any but a short period of time. He 
is a visible and audible teacher, acting only where 
he is and when he is somewhere present; that is, un- 
der conditions of locality. He can traverse a small 
country; he can pass on foot back and forth between 
Jerusalem and Jericho, or between Jerusalem and 
Galilee. It is not reported, I think, that he ever 
went as far south as Hebron, or more than once as 
far north as Dan. He did once cross the border 
into the coast of Tyre and Sidon, but never found 
his way over to Damascus. I^ow consider that he 
is come into the great world to be the teacher and 
Saviour of the world, and it will be seen at a glance 
that he is capable in body of no such transitional 



20 INSPIRATION BY THE HOLY SPIRIT 

velocity as permits the fulfilment of sucli an office. 
Besides, it is not enough that he should some time 
reach a given place or people ; he must be with them 
every week all round the world. Considered thus 
as a bodily nature, which was to be the great point 
of the incarnation^ his incarnation would thus be in 
another view his chain of detention, holding him 
back from everything most necessary to be done. 
Taken thus, in the large view of nations and peoples 
and in the long view of the times without limit, his 
bodily nature is adapted in fact to nothing which 
belongs to his undertaking. In fact nothing Chris- 
tian can be done with Christianity till the visible 
head, the embodied Christ, is taken quite away and 
substituted by some other mode or machinery of 
action set in his place. 'No being can do the work 
that is undertaken but one who is not under con- 
ditions of locality and brings to it an attribute of 
universal presence. The incarnation is a means to 
an end only for a certain time. After that time it 
must be ended. The incarnate person, living in the 
form of God and revealing the beauty and tragic 
love of God, will have prepared the necessary power 
to engage the feeling and make up the staple of a 
regenerative gospel. 

But he must not stay long enough to raise the 
question: How much longer? Three years of a 
merely cursitating pedestrian ministry are probably 
long enough to lodge this gospel in the world; and 
when that is done it is quite expedient that he go 
away. And when he goes, it is even required by the 
supposed conditions of the question that some un- 



INSPIRATION BY THE HOLY SPIRIT 21 

localized Inductor and Disseminator take his place, 
and minister his ministry without limit or travel or 
exhaustion. He requires too, it will be seen, to be 
omnipresent, not only as related to space but as re- 
lated to mind — all mind that is concerned to know 
and receive the salvation provided. How sublime 
the transition, and how manifestly squared and ap- 
pointed by the regulative wisdom of God! That 
the new Inductor thus to be established must be a 
Spirit divine is just as clear as that he must be in- 

1 exhaustible, never to be wearied by his multiplici- 

^ ties or staled by time. 

( But there was another reason which Christ had in 
mind when he asserted the expediency of his re- 
moval and the introduction of a successor working 
by another method, viz., that his gospel, gotten into 
language by his incarnate ministry and teaching, 
lacked altogether when taken by itself the efficiency 
needed to make it a great converting power. It 
does not appear that Christ gained many converts by 
his preaching; partly for the reason, I suppose, that 
he was always too much of a problem to be a proper 
word of salvation. His miracles begot a state of 
questioning and of idle wonder too curious to be 
convincingly serious; much as we see now in the 
levitations and aerial transportations and ghostly 
oracles of our wizard practitioners. For the time, 
in the first stages of the development of his mission 
the promulgations bore a look of extravagance; 
for what could be the impression first made by the 
assertion of a descent from heaven and of a nature 
mysteriously akin to God, but that Christ in such 



22 INSPIRATION BY THE HOLY SPIRIT 

pretences exceeded all bounds of nature and ration- 
al credibility? The material he was building thus 
into a history could never form to itself a state of 
settled conviction till after his withdrawment, when 
the disturbances of sight and sense were gone by. 
And not even then would there be any converting 
power in the revelation-story prepared. 

Mere revelation, or a word of truth that has got- 
ten form as in language, has by itself no effectually 
quickening or regenerative power in character. 
It stands before the mind, glassing truth in a way 
to act upon it, but it can accomplish nothing save 
as another kind of power acting in the mind makes 
it impressible under and by the truth. Hence 
the necessity of the Paraclete and the new dispen- 
sation, promised to complete the full organiza- 
tion of the saving plan. The gospel ended off in 
Christ or his personal story and set before the world 
would do little, save as another kind of power 
invisible is prepared in the world to raise a 
new sensibility for it and toward it. Christ him- 
self describes the initiating function of the Spirit by 
saying: " When he the Spirit of truth is come, he 
will guide you into all truth. He shall glorify me, 
for he shall receive of mine and shall show it unto 
you." That is, he will set you in a state of sensi- 
bility toward the truth that will be its glorification, 
and bring you into it as a new life. What follows is 
to be taken more popularly, not as indicating that 
the Holy Spirit is to receive and pass and show the 
truth, as it were, by literally acting on the truth and 
with it, but that, by a divine acting on the man, he 



INSPIRATION BY THE HOLY SPIRIT 23 

will give it a power to enter and possess and lodge 
itself and be inwardly appropriated. 

It lias sometimes been a seriously debated ques- 
tion whether the Holy Spirit operates by divine effi- 
ciency—that iSj by the absolute sway of omnipotence 
— or, what is conceived to be the better alternative, 
by mere influence or persuasion. The former con- 
ception is certainly not true; for why should so great 
pains be taken to prepare a gospel of life when there 
is really nothing to be done with it? when, in fact, 
new character is to be struck out after all as by 
lightning, wholly one side of the word and the 
prayers of the faithful and even the prayers of the 
subject himself? But if we say that the Spirit car- 
ries all effect by influence, what does it mean? In- 
fluence we cannot imagine to be some third thing 
between the Spirit and the souls to be renewed 
which, by acting upon it, he can turn persuasively. 
The true Christian idea appears to be that the Spirit 
operates efficiently in the subject to prepare him to 
the word, convincing him of sin, raising him up, for 
the time and more or less always, to a state of just 
sensibility, so that he may apprehend the divine 
things of Christ in a lively manner, and there stops 
short, as he must, laying no hand of force on the 
man that shall break his natural or thrust him out 
of his chosen liberty. Three kinds of agency must 
in this view always be concurrent in the change: 
first, the agency of the force-principle, uplifting the 
man to be swayed by his better sensibilities; sec- 
ondly, the agency of the gospel or word-principle, 
prepared to work regeneratively in and through his 



24 INSPIRATION BY THE HOLY SPIRIT 

sensibilities; and, thirdly, the assenting faith and 
concurrent yielding of the man's own liberty. 

It will appear from the outline thus far given that 
the Holy Spirit could not be conjunctively at work 
in his office at the same time that Christ was at work 
in his personal ministry. So heavy a disturbance in 
the senses took away of necessity all inwardness and 
power of meditational reception, requiring his par- 
ticular saving work to be for the time suspended. 
He was not, of course, sent out of the world, but was 
present in all mind as before. But there was a kind 
of pause in the inspirations, as we ourselves feel, and 
it could not be otherwise till after Christ should be 
taken away. It may be that there had never been 
a time for hundreds of years when the tides of in- 
spiration ran lower than when Christ was fulfilling 
his outward ministry. And then, when that was 
ended and everything was ready, as in gospel outfit, 
the new Christian era of the Spirit is inaugurated in 
the scene of the Pentecost, and his great inductor- 
ship is verified by the ingathering of converted thou- 
sands in a day. 

Y. The Inaugueal of the Spirit 

Assembled with the disciples after his resurrec- 
tion, he commanded them not to depart from Jerusa- 
lem, but to wait there for the promise of the Father, 
"which," saith he, "ye have heard of me; for ye 
shall be baptized with the Holy Ghost not many days 
hence.'' They waited accordingly for the unknown 
something of the promise, continuing all with one 



INSPIRATION BY THE HOLY SPIRIT 25 

accord in prayer and supplication for the unknown 
gift. It may not be, most strictly speaking, a gift 
unknown. He had called it himself their indue- 
ment with power from on high and also, as we just 
now saw, their being baptized with the Holy Ghost. 
And this latter expression was yet further explained 
when he said, shortly after: " Ye shall receive power 
after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you, and ye 
shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, in all 
Judea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost parts 
of the earth.'' They understand by a certain in- 
choate way of apprehension what it must signify to 
have power come upon them from above, what to 
have the Holy Ghost descend upon them; for there 
were desultory and sporadic manifestations of the 
Spirit all along down the Old Testament history; 
besides, they could hardly miss of some enthusiastic 
meaning in their own designation to be witnesses, 
the wide world through, to their Master and his 
truth. I do not say, observe, that they closely un- 
derstood for what they waited and prayed. How 
many of the very best, most fruitful Christian pray- 
ers never come into their own full meaning till 
their answer is born. They are, in fact, prayers for 
the Unknown, lifting as it were by their upward 
pressure the veil of mystery that shuts them in, till 
such time as they break through into God's revela- 
tion of their meaning in their answer. As it was in 
the prayers for a Messiah to come, so it is to be in 
these prayers for the new forthcoming of the Spirit. 
But the hour of the promise is now arrived. Sud- 
denly there is a sound from heaven as of a rushing, 



26 INSPIRATION BY THE HOLY SPIRIT 

mighty wind. What else, or less, should represent 
the invisible waft of the Spirit, the Pneuma or Life- 
Breath of God? And it filled and shook the place 
where they were sitting. Connected also with the 
wind-symbol, there were manifested lambent tips of 
fire sitting on the heads of the assembly; for this 
designation by flame was also needed to represent, 
as only fire can do it, the purifying touch and search 
of the Spirit. By these two symbols, breath and 
fire, added here as tokens, the virtual incarnation of 
the Spirit is also accomplished; for his revelation re- 
quired his coming into sense just as truly as did 
that of Christ, and for the same reasons. Another 
fact is added as first effect, viz., the speaking 
with tongues; which shows the Spirit making dis- 
course and playing out intelligence in words, a liv- 
ing proof that he is at the seat of intelligence within. 
So that here again the Spirit is got more nearly 
incarnated in that he is seen to be the occupant, if 
not of body, yet of mind. 

Taking now all these externalities together as tok- 
ens of manifestation, how impressive and wonder- 
fully apt is the inaugural of the Spirit that is given. 
"Without the first two, the wind-movement and the 
tips of flame, the tongues breaking out of silence 
in the little assembly would scarcely have been a 
sufficiently distinct announcement of the Spirit wait- 
ed for, and without the tongues the other two signs 
would have signified nothing as regards a Spirit of 
grace for mind. Indeed, all three of the outward 
signs would have failed of their significance if they 
had not been followed by the very work of the Spirit 



INSPIRATION BY THE HOLY SPIRIT 27 

itself, in a degree of power and cogency correspond- 
ing with the energetic vigor of the signs. And what 
do we see, but that these poor heart-broken disciples, 
who had been waiting here so many days for they 
knew not what, and had been disciples so far of a 
gospel whose meaning and future they as little un- 
derstood as they did the future story of the seven 
stars, have their minds suddenly opened, and one of 
them begins forthwith to preach directly out the 
whole Christ-mystery of a new salvation for the 
world. Conviction by the Spirit goes with the word, 
and multitudes crowding in from all the streets are 
converted to God, three thousand in a day. And 
this makes up the true inaugural of the Spirit. Of 
course, he is not to be inaugurated as God. I only 
mean that, as the gospel is to be a personal grace for 
the world, the way of the Spirit in the old time is 
to be replaced by his all-diffusive and personal 
agency. I do not find that, before this, any distinct 
and generally prevalent impression was held of his 
practical relation to sin and the implanting of a new 
life-principle in character, unless it be in the fifty- 
first Psalm already referred to. This henceforth is 
to be distinctly seen, and the whole new ministry of 
the Spirit is to be cast in this mould. 

It appears in at least two cases reported in the 
Acts of the Apostles (viii. 16, and xix. 5) that 
conversions, or what were so accounted, were made 
where the agency of the Spirit was for a time not 
understood; also, that when the sign of the Spirit 
was given in the laying on of hands or in baptism, 
the subjects immediately began to speak with 



28 mSPIRATION BY THE HOLY SPIRIT 

tongues and to prophesy. Hence it has been im- 
agined that these signs were considered to be and 
in fact were a fixed accompaniment of the Spirit. 
They may have been for a time, but after a time 
they certainly were not. The real question appears 
to be whether they belonged as casual demonstration 
to the inaugural of the Spirit, or whether they be- 
longed to the appointed products and fruits of the 
Spirit for all coming time. There was certainly 
something casual in the demonstrations of the in- 
augural scene, and something not casual, something 
pertaining to what is most inherent in the gospel 
plan itself. Certain English teachers have gone so 
far as to maintain that the demonstrations of con- 
version in the scene of the Pentecost were them- 
selves casual and extraordinary, having to do with 
nothing but the inauguration by the Spirit of a new 
Church order. Men, it is said^ are not to be con- 
verted in this sudden, almost indecorous, way here- 
after, but more gradually, in a more sacramental 
fashion. All these and other like questions will be 
discussed hereafter when we come to speak of mira- 
cles and supernatural manifestations, and are there- 
fore passed for the present. 

YI. Ways and Modes of the Spieit 

When we undertake a doctrine of the Spirit, we 
begin at once to question about his line of approach, 
his point of contact, whether he works without con- 
tact and by what kind of power. But the better 
way is to conceive him as arrived without approach, 



INSPIEATION BY THE HOLY SPIRIT 29 

at his point of contact without contact, working by 
no power physically representable. For all these 
are but figures of speech that undertake to dominate 
our conceptions, and if they are allowed to be ac- 
cepted literally are sure to breed mistake. The 
better way is to seize on a word of description that 
is not under conditions of matter and space, and say 
that the Spirit is immediately present and works 
immediately — so and not otherwise. In this mode 
of statement we drop out a great many questions that 
are not to be answered, and obtain a so much closer 
footing of doctrine. 

Starting now at this point of our immediate 
agency, is it so far immediate or in such a sense that 
it cannot be resisted? Many of the high Calvinistic 
school accept this conclusion without difficulty, and 
have it as a rather favorite form of doctrine to assert 
the resistless agency of the Spirit. The Spirit, they 
conceive, goes through to his mark like all the 
decretal forces and absolute determinations of God, 
and the agency is immediate in the sense that he 
does it as and when he pleases. He does not ask 
consent, but takes it without asking. This kind of 
teaching was never Scriptural, and is really a very 
great hindrance to any fair conception of the Spirit. 
The immediate agency of the Spirit supposes no such 
thing. We call it immediate because it is able with- 
out consultation or notification to raise a conviction, 
stir a feeling, turn the souFs currents of thought by 
a simply acted presence. But we need to ob- 
serve that the agency of the Spirit, immediate 
though it be, is in two degrees, which carry a 



30 INSPIRATION BY THE HOLY SPIRIT 

large distinction of idea, viz., the preparative 
or quickening agency, and the transforming or as- 
similative. We conceive it in the first stage as a 
power that wakens the religions nature out of sleep, 
makes the man attent, perceptive, receptive, and 
prepares him to be a susceptible receiver of God's 
revelations. By this mere quickening agency the 
man is prepared to the still more advanced kind of 
agency, for there is no such distinction of kind that 
the one may not pass forward into and be merged 
in the other. As a preparative and quickening agen- 
cy, it offers the subject to God's love and beauty 
and truth in such a manner as to be most effectively 
drawn by their attractions. There he has it for his 
right to stand all his life long, and make good his 
resistance to the last. But the address of the Spirit 
to his conscience, which is made by the opening of 
his heart to the love and beauty of God, ought to 
win a lodgement for inspiration in the charac- 
ter when, of course, he is born of God by the open- 
ing of the heart, that is, by a preparative and 
quickening agency. For this is the way of the Spir- 
it, who does not present the truth to the subject as 
filling the office of a preacher, but the subject to the 
truth, erect in the spirit of attention, quick in per- 
ception, tender in sensibility. He gives the truth 
advantage, not by adding a projectile force, but 
by setting all the windows of access open to its 
convincing and glad messages. His power as re- 
gards the new-born inspiration will be wholly in the 
man, never in the book. 

It becomes a matter therefore of some conse- 



INSPIRATION BY THE HOLY SPIRIT 31 

quence, in adjusting our conceptions of the Spirit, 
that we rightly construct our notions of his relation 
to us at the particular point of resistance. If he 
were out upon us in creative force, using omnipo- 
tence not merely at the point of quickening but in 
the very issue of conversion itself, it would be very 
difficult to adjust any moral conception at all of his 
agency. But we are abundantly authorized by 
many passages of Scripture to exclude any such idea. 
Thus it is declared by Stephen: " Ye do always re- 
sist the Holy Ghost/' which, of course, means that 
they resist in. some measurable way and degree. 
The style of the accusation is hyperbolical, and is 
plainly meant to be. It is a charge sent home by 
rhetorical emphasis, which does not consider quali- 
fications. Another passage supposes the possibility 
of resistance even to the extent of victory, at least 
for the time. The subject moved by the Spirit may 
turn himself away in such levity or neglect of man- 
ner as virtually to quench God's fire. ^^ Quench not 
the Spirit," therefore, is the Apostle's very heavily 
accented charge. 

Again, we have a very different case where the 
Apostle, speaking of such as have been graciously 
accepted and born of God, says: " Grieve not the 
Holy Spirit of God, whereby ye are sealed unto the 
day of redemption." Imputing grief to God is, to 
say the least, a figure of divine sensibility most re- 
markable. If there is anything tender in the world 
beyond all human comparison, it is this simple ap- 
peal to spare the grief of God. 

Thus far we encounter no Scripture that regards 



32 INSPIRATION BY THE HOLY SPIRIT 

the Holy Ghost as being so far offended by a course 
of resistance and bold transgression as to be finally 
and fatally irreconcilable. A single passage is often 
quoted as to that effect; that, I mean, which de- 
nounces the unpardonable sin, the sin of blasphemy 
against the Holy Ghost. Precisely what that sin is 
or was conceived to be I do not know, but words of 
blasphemy are words of wrath and desecration, 
words that are meant to mock the sanctities of the 
subject and trample him in contempt. Supposing 
an act committed of so great presumption, the con- 
sequences may follow in two degrees, or in one or 
the other of two degrees. The nature of the man 
may receive so heavy a shock as to be virtually para- 
lyzed and be henceforth the end of all his religious 
sensibilities. The scorch of his sin has burned out 
his susceptible life. I have seen a great many per- 
sons who imagined themselves to be in this condi- 
tion. But the remarkable thing in every case has 
been that, instead of being more inert and dead, they 
were lifted into virtual frenzy by the impetuosity 
of their self -accusations. If they are in such a state 
as they assume to be they ought even to care noth- 
ing for it, but think it a thing supremely ridiculous 
and laugh it away. 

Another way to use this Scripture is to handle it 
in a way more loose and accommodating. Consider 
it, for example, as intended to be a very cogent warn- 
ing — overstated, not exactly measured — bidding the 
disciples make a very serious matter of their rela- 
tions to the Holy Spirit, lest they some time wake to 
the discovery that they have trespassed too far. Per- 



INSPIRATION BY THE HOLY SPIRIT 33 

haps they will not be certainly forsaken of God, and 
perhaps they will. It would be a very hard way of 
treatment for disciples so little practised in divine 
things to be absolutely shut away from God, for the 
simple neglect of misimprovement of his Spirit on 
this or that or even many occasions. A great many 
of the Scripture threatenings are left in just this 
way. 

[These thoughts upon Inspiration seem to have been intended as 
introductory to a more far-reaching study of the Holy Spirit. In 
the remainder we have merely the headings of the subject as it lay 
in the mind of the author, awaiting development, a skeleton destined 
never to be filled in, except in so far as some of the divisions of 
the subject are treated in the preceding fragment.] 

The Holy Spirit 

For the Spirit of God is given to every man to 
profit withal. 
Misconceptions to be corrected. 

That the promise of the Comforter was the 

first appearing. 
That he is sent, or sent down, or poured out, 

or descends, or comes, or departs. 
That he is absent much of the time, that he 
withdraws often, and is in fact an occasional 
Spirit. 
That he is a person, real, not instrumental. 
True conception. 

That he is all-present, all-permeating, all- 
searching, correcting, nourishing. He loves 
all men alike, is for and with all men, press- 
ing in upon them, even as the atmosphere; 
natural symbol, air in motion. 



34 INSPIRATION BY THE HOLY SPIRIT 

It is to be as a higher breathing element. E'ature 
and natural breathing below. The supernatural 
breathing is another element, where the soul rises 
above natural things and causes, to know and be 
filled with a supernatural witness and life. 

An element of light, of conscious vigor, of purity, 
of confidence, of divine assimilation, of rest. 
What is necessary for this? 
Real afiinity for the best. 
Constant faith in the possibility. 
Purity of life. 
A Christly mind. 

A conception of the Spirit as not occasional, or 
resentful, or unwilling ever to embrace again 
and restore. 



Regeneration, conviction of sin, spiritual want, 

repentance, faith, sanctification, spiritual 

gifts. 
Immediate consciousness of witnessing with the 

Spirit. 
Interpretation by the Spirit. 
As many kinds of inspiration as of spiritual wants 

and duties. 
By what kind of a life one may keep and walk in 

the Spirit. 
Spirit sent — inaugurated. 
Spirit, before given. 
Spirit not absolute, resistible. 
Blasphemy against the Spirit. 
Discerning of the Spirit. 



INSPIRATION BY THE HOLY SPIRIT 35 

I. Division. 

Generalities of History and Condition. 
II. Division. 

Practical and Experimental Action. 
III. Division. 

Relation of the Spirit to the inspirations. 

How many kinds of inspiration. 

How they are to be distinguished, or by what 

evidence. 
Why the products have been so far restricted. 
There is no infallible inspiration. 
How the inspirations get their forms — supplied 

only by the subjects. 
All inspirations are supernatural. Whether 

miracles go with them? 
Have they ceased? Will they ever cease? 



PART II 

SERMONS 



CHRIST THE FORM OF THE SOUL* 
Until Christ be formed in you. — Galatians iv. 19. 

What form is to body, character is to spirit. Eor 
as all material bodies are shaped by the outline or 
boundary which contains them, so the soul has its 
working and life contained within the limits or laws 
of the character. Indeed, we can give no better 
definition of character than to say that it is the form 
of the spirit, that habit or mould into which the 
feelings, principles, aims, thoughts and choices have 
settled. 

And as all material objects have their beauty in 
their forms, so the soul has her beauty in the char- 
acter, that lovely shape of goodness and truth in 
which she appears to men. It is on the ground of 
this analogy between form and character that the 
word image is so frequently used in Scripture with 
a spiritual sense. Other kindred words are used in 
a similar manner. Thus it is that Christ, the divine 
Word, is spoken of as being in the form of God, 
the image of God, the image of the invisible God, 

* Preached in the North Church, Hartford, February, 1848. 
This sermon has been often asked for, because it was alluded to 
in an account of a personal religious experience -vrritten by Mrs. 
Bushnell and contributed to *^ The Life and Letters of Horace 
Bushnell," pp. 191-193, q. v. 

39 



40 CHRIST THE FORM OF THE SOUL 

the express image of Hs person. In the same way 
man is said to be created in the image of God, the 
design being not only to affirm a resemblance be- 
tween his nature and God's, but also that his char- 
acter is in the form or likeness of God. 

It is under the same analogy also that we call sin, 
deformity. We conceive the feelings passing into 
ugly and perverse shapes, the temper growing angu- 
lar and crabbed, the thoughts limping by the judg- 
ment-seat of the conscience as a troop of foul and 
half -disabled phantoms, the soul herself, in fact, be- 
coming a shrivelled and withered form, a base and 
haggish spectre of guilt. Sin takes away the image 
or form of God, and makes the soul a truly deformed 
creature. Such is everywhere the representation of 
Scripture. 

These remarks will prepare us to understand the 
real intent of Paul in my text. He is addressing 
the Galatian disciples, who have lost in a degree 
their spirituality, and he is afflicted by the deepest 
anxiety on their account. He longs to see them re- 
stored to the liberty they once had, to see them fixed 
in this liberty, and rising to a pitch of character that 
is high above their previous attainments. In a 
word, he desires their sanctification. And this he 
beautifully conceives to be the same as having Christ 
formed within them. " My little children, of whom 
I travail in birth again until Christ be formed in 
you." He imagines Christ dwelling in their soul 
or spirit, and giving it a form out of his own. This 
we may say is the grand object of the gospel plan. 
Tor this Christ is incarnated in the world. Being 



CHRIST THE FORM OF THE SOUL 41 

in the form of God, the eternal Word assumes hu- 
manity, that he may bring into humanity the form 
of a divine character. By the incarnation he de- 
scends to our level, and makes the closest approach 
possible to our human feeling. He lives with us 
and among us. He tastes all our sorrows and be- 
comes a partaker in our adversities. He even bows 
himself to the burden of our sins and drinks the 
cup of shame and ignominy for us. In a word, he 
is as perfectly one with us as he can be and not be 
a sinner with us. Meantime he is the clear image 
of the divine beauty and goodness, the express image 
of God. We behold his glory, as of the only be- 
gotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. In 
his life all the depths of divine purity, mercy and 
goodness are unbosomed to us. We see, too, in his 
divine modes of carriage and conduct that which is 
the essential form of God's perfect character. 

If now we embrace him, we embrace the divine 
Word. He becomes united to us and habited within 
us. Our love gives him a welcome in our soul and 
entertains him there. This we may call repentance, 
faith, conversion, regeneration, or by whatever 
name. The sublime reality is that the divine has 
made a junction with our nature, and Christ has be- 
gun to be formed within us — only begun. Hence- 
forth the great object and aim of the Christian life 
is to have what is begun completed. Whether we 
speak now of growth, of sanctification, of complete 
renovation, or redemption, everything is included in 
this, the having Christ formed within us. This 
measures all our attainments, this is the mark of 



42 CHRIST THE FORM OF THE SOUL 

our high calling, the end or consummation in attain- 
ing which we are complete in all good. God seeks 
nothing else. We have nothing else to seek. 

In this we see a beautiful correspondence with 
what we just now said of sin as a cause of deformity. 
The deformity is removed when Christ is formed in 
us. And how manifest is it that nothing short of this 
can truly restore our nature. Some persons imagine 
that nothing is wanting in us, save to do what we 
may in and upon ourselves by self -reformation, self- 
culture, a life of duty and good works and a faith- 
ful endeavor to polish and beautify ourselves. As 
if we could put ourselves on a footing with God 
without any gift from him, or participation of his 
divine nature ! And what can be a more dreary and 
cheerless faith than this, which leaves a man only 
to his own will-works, to be forever at work upon 
his own soul and toiling at a self-perfecting process, 
without any sense of union to God or hope of a 
derivative grace from him. What a joy and relief 
it should be to the soul to find the incarnate Word 
descending to its aid, to go out of herself and rest 
herself in a love not her own, and thus to form her- 
self unto a new and noble life by adherence to 
another ! 

When Christ says : " Come unto me," how deep is 
the meaning, if we understand that Christ formed 
within us is the very good he comes to yield us! 
And so, when he says : ^' I am the vine, ye are the 
branches," it is as if the divine life passing into the 
human were the hidden sap of the vine passing into 
the branches, to unfold the leaves and color the 



CHRIST THE FORM OF THE SOUL 43 

fruit. In like manner did the apostle, setting forth 
the whole scope of the gospel as a renovating power, 
say : " But we all, with open face beholding as in a 
glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the 
same image from glory to glory.'' If, then, we are 
to succeed * [in the effort to complete our Christian 
life] we must succeed in God's way, and take the 
method he himself has chosen. The main difficulty 
with us is to entertain a thought so high as that he 
is concerned to have Christ formed in us. Inspir- 
ing and glorious thought, if we can only receive it 
and believe in it! Open your soul to it and give it 
welcome. Consider and know that the divine Word, 
being himself in the form of God, has descended to 
you and become the foundation power of a new life 
in you. He comes to impart the divine. And this 
alone is your sanctification. It moves from him and 
not from you. It is no vague struggle to ascend 
some height you cannot see, no wearisome, legal 
drill of duty and self-cultivating discipline. It is 
simply and only to have your being filled and occu- 
pied and transformed by Christ. Consider what 
you would be if the divine Word had rested in you, 
instead of in Jesus the Son of Mary. What you 
would thus become, you are really and truly to be. 
Viewed in this light, sanctification is the brightest 
and sublimest thought ever offered to a rational 
creature. If you had thought otherwise before, if 
before the work seemed forbidding or dry, every- 
thing repulsive or uninviting now disappears. 

*The sentence in brackets is a condensation of several para- 
graphs. — Editor. 



44: CHRIST THE FORM OF THE SOUL 

Or if you have looked despairingly upon this 
workj believe in God, and your despair will give 
way to courage and hope. Doubtless your sins are 
strong and you are weak, but Christ is here, and 
Christ is not weak. Had you looked upon the vast 
abyss of chaos, without form and void and covered 
with the pall of darkness, you might well have de- 
spaired, considering only what powers chaos had in 
itself wherewith to pass into form, fill itself with 
light and clothe itself in beauty. But when you be- 
hold the divine Spirit hovering over it, and the di- 
vine Word by whom the worlds were made descend- 
ing into it, to form it into shapes that dwell in the 
eternal mind, then surely there is hope even for 
chaos. So also in the wilder chaos of sin that reigns 
within you. There is nothing, in fact, that you can 
undertake with so great hopefulness and assurance 
as a victory over yourselves, if only you can believe 
in God. It is nothing then but to have Christ 
formed in you, and that is a work to be done not 
as much by you as by him. 

Still there is something for you to do. And here 
we may sum up all in one comprehensive rule, viz., 
that you are to present yourselves to Christ in just 
that way that will most facilitate his power over you 
and in you. If you are truly his disciple and united 
to him by faith, then he has already begun the trans- 
forming process of which we speak, and nothing is 
wanted but to remove all hindrances out of his way 
and offer yourself to him in every manner, active 
and passive, that will most expedite his gracious de- 
signs. Make this your constant rule of proceeding, 



CHRIST THE FORM OF THE SOUL 45 

shape your life by it; observe it with religious fidel- 
ity. Let all your plans and works and questions be 
determined by this one law — so to conduct your life 
that Christ will have the greatest power over you 
and in you, and you will find all difficulties melting 
away before his gracious power. Live to Christ, 
and Christ will live and reign in you. Your mind 
will grow clear, your affections pure, you will ascend 
into liberty and the bondage of sin under which you 
now groan will be left behind you. 

[What, then, is it to live to Christ?]* Remem- 
ber that he said: ^^ Whosoever he be of you that 
forsaketh not all that he hath, cannot be my dis- 
ciple." And in another place he says: ^^ Deny thy- 
self, take up thy cross and follow me.'' E^ow the 
object of these requirements is to empty the soul, 
so that Christ may find room in it. Therefore you 
must die to the world and to selfishness in all its 
forms, and here is the hardest struggle you have 
anywhere to encounter. The power of the world 
is great, and you are accustomed to bow to it and 
love it. The forms of selfishness are so many and 
so cunningly hidden that you will need to make the 
most searching scrutiny to detect them. The opin- 
ions and fashions of the world will crowd upon you. 
Your industry will tempt you, your idleness will 
tempt you. Flattery, money, ambition, society, the 
lust of the eye, appetite indulged so as to stifle your 
feelings and clog your spirit, carnal lusts, anger, 
pride, vanity, envy will all be trying their seduc- 
tions, and stealing back into your heart as often as 
* This is also a consolidated sentence. — Editor. 



46 CHRIST THE FORM OF THE SOUL 

they are thrust away. You may even seek religion 
for the luxury of feeling there is in it or the joy it 
may yield. 

Selfishness and self-love must be crucified. You 
must be willing to bear the cross. If you are to 
behold in Christ as in a glass the glory of the Lord 
and be changed into the same image, you must look 
with open face. Every veil must be torn away that 
his unobstructed beauty may shine directly into your 
heart. Having made sure that all hindrances are 
removed, you must draw yourself as closely to Christ 
as possible and receive as fully as you can his spirit. 
You must have the closest intimacy and be, as it 
were, one spirit with him. You will need to make 
his character and life a perpetual study, and dwell 
on them till your intellectual life is filled with Christ- 
like thoughts and images of divine beauty drawn 
from his person. Your good and Christ-like affec- 
tions will help your understanding, and the truths 
that fill your understanding will feed your affections. 

More will depend on a right use of prayer than 
on any other kind of exercise. This will keep your 
soul open to Christ and pliant to all divine disposi- 
tions. Offer your prayers in his name. Love the 
exercise, because it draws you so closely to him. 
Live in prayer, by prayer and upon it. Pray al- 
ways, let your life itself be an aspiration after 
Christ, an earnest and holy longing for society with 
him. Bringing yourself thus into the most intimate 
and closest possible union of spirit with Christ, you 
will find that he grows dearer to you and holds a 
more complete and blessed power over you, and thus 



CHRIST THE FORM OF THE SOUL 47 

you will have a growing confidence that he is being 
formed in you. 

You are called meantime to make your life an 
imitation of Christ; for though you are to be changed 
only by his power dwelling in you, still you will 
never offer yourself so completely to his power as 
when you are actively concerned to be like him. 
The Scriptures seem to me to set it before us to live 
the very life of Christ himself. Of course, there is 
something in the office and divine relation of Christ 
to men that requires a difference. But with this 
reserve, and regarding Christ in his human life and 
relations, we are called to be as like him in charac- 
ter as one human being ever can be to another. We 
have all diversities of natural character. We are 
men and women, young and old, different in our 
powers, callings, duties and spheres. This diver- 
sity is one of God's appointments and cannot be 
done away. It is beautiful in itself and will 
continue, I doubt not, forever. Still we may receive 
the very spirit and beauty of Christ himself. We 
are to partake even the divine through him, and live 
a life that is fashioned by the divine Word living 
in us. The Saviour himself says: "Learn of me.'' 
Discovering the spirit of ambition in his disciples, he 
requires of them to forsake such thoughts and to 
receive another spirit from their Master. " Who- 
soever will be chief among you let him be your ser- 
vant, even as the Son of Man came not to be min- 
istered unto but to minister." That is to say: 
" Your calling is mine. You are not in the world 
to gratify yourselves, but you are here to minister 



48 CHRIST THE FORM OF THE SOUL 

as truly as I am." And if all his disciples had it as 
the object of their lives to minister and communicate 
good, what a transforming power would they find in 
such a life ! How visibly to others, how consciously 
to themselves would Christ be formed in them! 

Again, in that beautiful scene where he washes 
the disciples' feet, what does he teach? What he 
does is nothing in itself, it communicates no good 
and relieves no misery, it is intended simply as a 
spiritual lesson to their hearts. " If I then, your 
Lord and Master, have washed your feet, ye ought 
also to wash one another's feet. The servant is not 
greater than his Lord, neither he that is sent greater 
than he that sent him." He thus lays it upon them 
to follow him in his seK-oblivion, his unambitious 
and pure life of love, to be willing to do or to suffer 
anything, in a word, to be wholly unselfish as he 
himself is. But, on the other hand, and as if show- 
ing where their true ambition should be, he said in 
his last prayer: " The glory which thou hast given 
me I have given them." What could he give us 
more than a participation of the divine glory? And 
again he says: "My peace I give unto you." And 
once again : " These things I have spoken unto you 
that my joy might remain in you and that your joy 
might be full." Glory, peace, joy — Christ's own 
glory, joy and peace ! What more could be offered 
us, what higher participation of the divine? 

I have thus endeavored to set before you that 
which is the highest and sublimest hope ever offered 
to man, and the manner also in which this hope may 
be attained to. The great design of God in the 



CHRIST THE FORM OF THE SOUL 49 

incarnation of his Son is to form a divine life in you. 
It is to produce a Christ in the image of your soul, 
and to set you on the footing of a brother with the 
divine "Word himself. ^^ This is the will of God, 
even your sanctification," and upon this Christly 
character formed in you rests the fellowship and 
glory of the redeemed world. He will raise the 
human even to the divine, for it is only in the pure 
divine that God can have complacence and hold com- 
munion. To entertain such a thought seems a kind 
of daring, but faith is a daring exercise. We must 
be daring, to ascend high enough to meet God's 
thoughts concerning us and his purposes toward us. 
Paul in one of his utterances seems to go farther 
than we have done. He speaks of the divine Lord 
himself as coming to be glorified in his saints and 
'^ be admired in all them that believe," as if some 
glory were to accrue, some admiration come unto 
Christ himself, from those whom he has formed to 
the image of his own likeness and glory. 

If now, my brethren, your hearts have been long- 
ing after some more advanced state, but have not 
seen how you can rise to it, if your soul has been 
discouraged and depressed and the struggle has 
seemed insupportable, here is relief. The work is 
not yours only. God is in it, cherishing higher de- 
signs for you probably than you have ever con- 
ceived. God's plan for you all is to have Christ 
formed in you. And the only question for you is 
whether you will suffer it. Can you put away your 
hindrances? Can you present your soul to the di- > 
vine occupancy of Christ so as to favor his power / 



50 CHRIST THE FORM OF THE SOUL 

in you? Can you draw your life into the active 
imitation of Jesus ? Suppose it were offered you to- 
day as your calling to go forth and be to men, to 
yourself and to God all that Christ was in his hu- 
man walk, to be sent into the world as he was, to 
minister as he ministered, to carry his light, his 
peace, his joy, his glory to men, to reveal his purity, 
to suffer with his patience! And what but this is 
the calling and mission of the gospel? That won- 
derful beauty with which Christ has irradiated the 
world it is his very purpose to form in you. Such 
a thought, it would almost seem, were enough to 
inspire the dead. 

And if this hope may not be instantly fulfilled or 
completed in you, enough that it may begin and 
every day add something of progress toward it. 
What progress has been made by apostles and other 
holy men, you have seen in their lives. The same is 
possible to you, possible to all. Christ may be 
formed in you, in the same manner as he has been 
in them. O, what rest may such a confidence impart 
to every sinner on earth who will truly give himself 
to God! If we speak of struggles, Christ was him- 
self a living struggle with evil, but he had his joy 
and peace, and so will you. And when life and 
struggle is over, then you will discover the divine 
filling your nature, all that is human in you trans- 
formed by the renewing of Christ, and your vile 
body itself fashioned like unto his glorious body. 
This is redemption. Then you are pure indeed, 
even as Christ is pure. You have borne the image 
of the earthy, now you bear the image of the 



CHRIST THE FORM OF THE SOUL 51 

heavenly. You discern in yourself, and all others 
discern in you, the perfect lineaments of Christ. 
Christ is formed in you. The work is done. 

Canst thou suffer such a work as this? Wilt thou 
let it enter thy bosom and reign there ? Canst thou 
deny thyself for it? Canst thou cast away the dull 
pleasures and the dross of this world's good for it? 
Shall it be thy pleasure to live in the imitation of 
Jesus and to offer thy soul to his gracious indwelling 
and power? This, O man! is life, and to this I 
delight to assure thee to-day thy Saviour calls thee, 
saying: ^^ Take my yoke upon thee and learn of me, 
and thou shalt find rest unto thy soul." The fulness 
of Christ's fulness shall be in thee. His glory and 
peace shall rest upon thee. - 



II 

UJ^CONSCIOUS PEOPHECY* 

And this spake he, not of himself ; but being high-priest 
that year, he prophesied that Jesus should die for that 
nation. — John xi. 51. 

The word prophecy is sometimes used to denote a 
mere holding forth in the spirit, an exhortation, 
warning, or preaching exercise, and sometimes a 
foretelling of future events. What are called '^ the 
prophetical writings " in Scripture contain a mixture 
of both kinds of prophecy, for the prophets were the 
preachers of their times, as well as oracles of God 
concerning times future. 

There are also two kinds of prophecy considered 
as a foretelling of future things. Pirst, when the 
prophet or speaker, lifted above his mere human 
plane of vision by the spirit of God, consciously re- 
cites or paints the facts of future history; and, sec- 
ond, when, either with or without any lifting of 
inspiration, he in fact does the same thing and is 
seen afterward to have done it, though at the time 
he is wholly unaware of the significance of his words. 
The former kind is conscious prophecy; the latter, 
which is the prophecy of Caiaphas, is unconscious 
prophecy, and it is of this that I propose to speak. 

* Preached in the North Church, Hartford, September, 1854. 
53 



UNCONSCIOUS PROPHECY 63 

It was no thought of Caiaphas, you will observe, 
that he was foretelling or fore-indicating anything. 
It is the Evangelist coming after who discovers the 
prophetic matter in his words, just as we often say, 
alluding back to forms of words strikingly coincident 
with facts that have now come to pass: ^^ What a 
prophecy there was in those words," or more simply, 
" They were prophetic words." Thus, according to 
the Evangelist, Caiaphas was simply giving advice 
to the Sanhedrim or Great Council. Some of the 
other members were saying: '^ As things are tending 
now the people will all go after Jesus, and what 
remains of our nationality under the Romans will 
then be taken away." He replies, showing that 
such fears are pusillanimous and foolish : '' Ye know 
nothing at all nor consider that it is expedient for us 
that one man should die for the people and that the 
whole nation be not ruined," which was equivalent 
to saying : " It is a very easy matter to be clear of 
your anxieties. Let the one man die himself instead 
of requiring the nation to die or be ruined because 
of him." He has no thought of prophecy. He is 
simply showing as a politician what is expedient, or 
^^ giving counsel." As the Evangelist says in his 
18th Chapter: ^^ ]^ow Caiaphas was he which gave 
counsel to the Jews that it was expedient for one to 
die for the people." It is the Evangelist himself, 
writing after the event of Christ's death, who dis- 
covers the prophecy. He finds it specially in the 
substitutive or sacrificial language used by Caiaphas 
and in the fulfilment of that language by the death 
of Christ, a coincidence or fulfilment which he thinks 



54 UNCONSCIOUS PROPHECY 

indicates some higlier law and power, preparing the 
language for the fact and the fact for the language. 
" And this he spake not of himself (not by mere 
self -instigation), but being high-priest that year (set 
in a position of eminence where his words would 
have a more signal consequence) he prophesied that 
Jesus should die for that nation, and not for that 
nation only, (the Evangelist will have the prophecy 
to be as broad as all the consequences), but that also 
he should gather together in one the children that 
were scattered abroad." The opinion of the writer 
seems to be that Caiaphas, being a high-priest of the 
law, it was so ordered and by inward instigation pre- 
pared, that in his high official eminence before the 
nation he should use a sacrificial form of words con- 
cerning the death of Christ that would be signally 
verified in the spiritual significance and power of 
that event, as an offering for the sins of the world. 

That the Evangelist should call such words a 
prophecy may seem to many to be either a forced 
method of speaking, or else to savor in a degree of 
superstition. But we should be less prone, I think, 
to this kind of scepticism if we felt how close to us 
the future is and in how many ways we are set in 
contact with it. 

As finite beings we are always at a point between 
the past and the future, having one behind us and 
the other before us, and a most real and valid con- 
nection with both, with one by memory, with the 
other by some anticipative exercise in the nature of 
prophecy. That we regard as a matter quite easy 
and simple. This we appear commonly to regard 



UNCONSCIOUS PROPHECY 56 

with distrust or incredulity, as a matter wholly be- 
yond our range, a feat of intelligence too mysterious 
and transcendent for rational belief. And yet there 
is nothing in prophecy, inherently speaking, more 
wonderful than in memory. Or if we ask how it is 
possible to remember and restore the past, we can 
as easily conceive how it is possible to open or fore- 
cast the future. I call up to-day by an act of will 
things which happened thirty years ago, see them, 
recognize them, set them in order. Where, mean- 
time, have they been? We say in a figure that they 
have been stored up in the mind. But where is the 
store? Are they written in language on the brain? 
E'o. Are they painted in images on it, as images 
are painted in the eye when we see? 'No; for the 
images seen we know are there, but of the images 
of memory we have no such knowledge. Besides, 
how did I call them up? If they were in my 
thought already they did not want recalling; if they 
were not, then how did I by will recall them? This 
matter of memory we thus find to be a mystery 
wholly transcendent. And yet the past lies close 
about us, certifies itself to us, opens its records, and 
we read them by an act as familiar as sight. How 
much more distant or, inherently speaking, more 
difficult is the way to the future? 

For aught that appears, God might as easily have 
given us an oracle faculty as an historic — made us 
to anticipate the future as easily as to memorize the 
past, l^either let it surprise you if I go so far as 
to say that, in effect, he has done it, and that we do 
actually foresee as many things as we remember. 



56 UNCONSCIOUS PROPHECY 

Thus, if we set ourselves to a definite reckoning or 
inventory of what we remember, it will be found 
that everything past is vanished and gone, save a few 
leading articles of experience. And when we un- 
dertake to be more definite — as to restore the events, 
actings and thoughts of some particular day or scene 
— we consciously find ourselves groping among 
shadows and dim guesses half realized, just as we do 
when we are trying to ^x or settle the particulars 
of some future day. Sometimes we wake up in sur- 
prise to find that we remember so few things, a 
danger here or there, an afiliction, an effort, a strug- 
gle of mind, a few names of comrades, teachers, 
friends — mere shadows all. The past, we exclaim 
inwardly, is vanished and gone; the future is so full 
in our eye that we are acting always for it with at 
least some reasonable degree of confidence and cer- 
tainty. All our works of ambition, our acquisitions, 
plans, hopes, are based in the assumption that we 
have some intelligent grasp of the future. It is very 
true that we do not see all that we seem to see, yet 
we do see enough not to be absurd in what we do. 
"We act on computations that are at least rational. 
And sometimes we see the future better than we re- 
member the past. We know, for example, that we 
shall die, but we do not remember our birth. How 
little we really know of our past and of all that is 
primal in our history is seen by the fact that it is 
a question seriously raised whether we did not pre- 
exist in some other state before we came into this. 
!N'o matter how little ground there may seem to be 
for such a question, it still signifies much that the 



UNCONSCIOUS PROPHECY 57 

question is possible, showing behind us a dim world 
of shadow in which our fancy may grope '^ in wan- 
dering mazes lost." 

In short, we may take the astronomer as a kind of 
type of human life. Beginning at the point of the 
present and taking gauge of it by present observa- 
tions, he can range either backward or forward, mak- 
ing out his almanac of the past and his almanac of 
the future for all the worlds of the sky. But his 
almanac of the past is limited by the possible date of 
a beginning. And that of the future rests on the 
demonstrated order and stability of causes that are 
as good for illimitable ages as for to-day. Taking 
the worlds as vehicles in which so many beings im- 
mortal are to have their passage, he sees them riding 
in security down the track of ages, canopied by 
clouds and seasons, suffering, rejoicing and toiling 
as they do and have done to accomplish their untold 
periods of life. And such are we all. We live be- 
tween the past and the future, and are set to have 
our backward and forward computations of both. 

We have an interest in the future quite as deep 
and vivid as the interest we have in the past. This 
will not be denied or doubted^ for we live almost 
wholly for the future. What we have been or done 
or seen is past, it cannot be altered. It has often 
a dear, more commonly a sad or sorrowful interest 
for us. But the future is our home, and all our steps 
are thitherward. What we are to be, see, have — 
in a word, what is to become of us — that is the great 
question for us all. And it comprehends much ; not 
to-day only or to-morrow, but the long progression 



68 UNCONSCIOUS PROPHECY 

of eternity. Behind us we have but a few hours' 
time, before us we have eternity. Even if it be 
cessation or nothingness, still it is eternity.* 

We have properties or instincts which are antici- 
pative or forelooking, as well as those which are 
recollective. The instinct of knowledge, or the de- 
sire to know, reaches forward and backward alike. 
The fears are anticipative wholly, sending out their 
scouts to find what enemies and dangers are lurking 
for us in our future path. The desires and aspira- 
tions are all reaching after something future, hun- 
gering, prying, hunting after forms of good or bless- 
ing unattained. The imagination, instigated by 
these manifold longings, is continually coasting 
round the future scenes, and is a faculty that spe- 
cially loves to be busied in anticipative exercises. 
Hope is a power that rejoices in the apprehension of 
things before, and rests sublimely in the confidence 
of realities to come. And thus we see that while 
the memory, the regrets, the endearments of grati- 
tude and the retributive sentiments of justice or re- 
venge reach backward, the vast majority of the 
instincts in our nature set the other way, moving 
in a heavy rush upon the future, even as a tide roll- 
ing in upon the shore. 

We are always acting a future, so to speak, in 
what we do ; for everything done is the cause of some 
definite future, so that if we understand what we 
are doing under the laws of causation we do in that 
fact have a definite foresight. The whole past and 

* See article in Moral Uses of Dark Things on Oblivion or Dead 
History. — Editor. 



UNCONSCIOUS PROPHECY 69 

present are, in fact, the germ of what is future, and 
that in a sense so comprehensive that all the past 
represents, or in one view contains, all the future. 
Thus it was that Caiaphas, trained up in the sacri- 
fices of the law, falls unwittingly into a form of ex- 
pression that interprets Christ and Christianity, even 
as they are the fulfilment and final aim of the sac- 
rificial plan. The drill he had had in the germ was 
so closely related to the ripe fruit, that he spoke of 
it by a kind of latent impulse before the time. This, 
too, he was the more likely to do because being 
high-priest that year he had more of the future in 
him, or a more comprehensive relation to the future, 
than a common private citizen. All public men, 
being more at the head of causes and themselves 
moving a greater number of causes are, of course, 
in a more sovereign position as regards the future 
and have a distincter sense of it. Considering 
then how all actions have a future, a definite and 
certain future to come after them, and how the 
whole past is the germ of the whole future, what 
wonder is it if we sometimes fall into the vein of 
the future to such a degree as almost unwittingly 
to speak it ? As the river rolls on expecting the sea, 
so we in the momentum and flood of life can hardly 
fail at times to fix on the issue toward which we are 
tending. There is, too, a very subtle power of sug- 
gestion in the courses of things, as you may see in 
the fact that a great many leading minds, who are 
the prophets so to speak of their times, will start up 
without concert at points wide asunder in the pur- 
suit of the same subjects and a publication of the 



60 UNCONSCIOUS PROPHECY 

same trutJis. The past becomes in them a kind of 
prophetic germination. And sometimes they take 
up expectations which they give out to the world, 
hardly conceiving how they came by them, and then 
these published expectations, starting their trains of 
causes, finally produce in that manner the things 
expected and so become prophecies. Thus when 
Yirgil in his famous lines_, sometimes called his 
prophecy, foretold the universal dominion of the 
Romans, the words themselves were a powerful 
cause to produce the fact, yet how he came by the 
expectation revealed in the words he probably could 
not tell. Some power of the past was working in 
him and so preparing the future. Or, taking a case 
yet more remarkable, Seneca, lifted somehow by his 
imagination, foretold in a sort of prophecy the great 
discovery of Columbus. He says : " 'New ages shall 
come in the tardy course of years when the Ocean 
shall loosen her bands of empire and the great earth 
spread out enlarged, and Typys uncover new realms, 
and the Ultima Thule be a boundary no more.'' 
Then moved in part, not unlikely, by just such ex- 
pectations secretly awakened and creeping through 
the world, Columbus ventures on the trial and turns 
anticipations of fancy into words of prophecy. So 
we are always acting, thinking, starting causes that 
connect a future. If there is always a real future 
in us, a past streaming into futurity through us, 
which cannot be doubted, what forbids that we some- 
times become greater prophets than we know. 

It is another consideration, not to be omitted, that 
the human mind is originally made to have an exer- 



UNCONSCIOUS PROPHECY 61 

cise that is fellow to the mind and will of God, so 
that if it were unhinged by no disorder of sin it 
would most naturally think the thoughts of God and 
run a course harmonious with the ways of God. It 
would, in short, be a kind of universal prophet, keep- 
ing pace with Providence, seeing what is true and 
living accordantly with the future God is ever un- 
folding. What wonder then is it if, being in a state 
of disorder, it should some time fall into gleams of 
true insight or agreement and think the things that 
are really coming to pass; just as insane persons will 
often fall into gleams of sober truth and reason 
which indicate an almost surprising insight into the 
realities of the world. Hence, it may be, the fact 
so often occurring that persons who are the subject 
of thought or conversation just then make their ap- 
pearance. Three persons — I recite a fact — are sit- 
ting by a writer's fire. After a period of silence 
and revery, one of them speaks, inquiring what has 
become of a friend living in a distant State. A 
second replies, " How came you to be thinking of 
him? I was thinking of him also." The third, yet 
more surprised, says the same. And, while they are 
wondering at the coincidence, the bell rings and the 
friend appears. What now is this possibly but an 
instance of the fact that all minds in their healthy 
state, undisordered by sin, would naturally run so 
as to chime in this manner unconsciously with all the 
ways of Providence and the actual events to come? 
What more is it than to believe that they will have 
a general and even particular harmony with God's 
thoughts and plans ? And if it be so in the upright 



62 UNCONSCIOUS PROPHECY 

state of souls, what should we expect but that some- 
times in their deep disorder they will do the same, 
giving token therein of what their sinless state 
would be? 

There is still another view of the strange coin- 
cidences referred to, which brings us to the same 
point. For there is not only an original affinity be- 
tween the soul and God, such as we have suggested, 
but he has an active ever-present government in 
mind coincidently with his whole plan or system of 
empire. It is common to dismiss these coincidences 
by the thought that they are only accidents or acci- 
dental concurrences in time. But there is no such 
thing as accident — that is itself the greatest of fic- 
tions and the most incredible. Grod governs sys- 
tematically, which is the same as to say that he gov- 
erns comprehensively. Either all things transpire 
in a plan as relatives in a grand whole, or else there 
is no whole. By his providential sway and the 
secret sway of his spirit then, we find him turning 
the courses of mind and matter together as a com- 
prehensive whole, part answering to part, mind to 
matter and matter to mind, thoughts to events and 
events to thoughts, all things to all in a chime of 
universal order and law. It should not therefore 
surprise us that mind, in the power of his all-com- 
prehensive rule — for it will be so in part even while 
it struggles to break loose — should sometimes think 
and see in a manner of unconscious prophecy. Were 
it not for the resistance of God's spirit, the mind of 
God thus communicated would sweep through all 
created mind, tempering it to his sway, as a wind 



UNCONSCIOUS PROPHECY 63 

through the strings of an instrument, causing them 
to vibrate in responsive sounds of harmony. And 
then, instead of imagining that the coincidences of 
mind referred to are merely accidental, it would be 
a wonder that minds should ever fall out of chime 
or fail to think coincidently with all that is to come. 
Unconscious prophecy would be, in fact, the com- 
mon state of existence. 

It remains to suggest that God has set in the soul 
one faculty or power whose particular office it is to 
be an oracle and a prophet of the future. I speak 
of the conscience. As the memory was put in 
charge of the past, or set to connect us with the 
past, so the conscience is appointed to connect us 
with the future. It shows us the way to a good 
future and the way to a bad. Lay aside the Bible 
and all revelation, dismiss all the reasonings of im- 
mortality and a future state, think nothing of that 
future if you can, here is yet a prophet shrouded in 
the deep recess of the mind whose imperial, inevi- 
table sentence must be heard. You do not call it 
prophecy, yet there is a true opening here of reali- 
ties unthought or unthinkable, a crowding in upon 
the soul of assurances vast as eternity and deep as 
the peace of God. As the phantom visitor came to 
Brutus saying: '^ You shall see me again at Philippi," 
and kept his word, so this dumb prophet of the soul 
unasked beckons it away to its doom or its glory 
and compels it to see, whether it will or no, what 
issue is coming to the battle. And then around this 
central light all the active shapes of thought and fear 
and hope and imagination gather in as interpreters, 



64 UNCONSCIOUS PROPHECY 

to fill out the picture and display the solemn worlds 
of good or bad experience to come. Even memory 
is summoned up to add her testimony and complete 
the prophecy. 

Thus it was that Cain, instructed by no revelation 
of things future, became a prophet, by force as it 
were of his crime, because he had roused in that 
manner the dumb prophet of judgment within. His 
conscience made him see visions and sent him forth 
in his bad ecstasy of fear, testifying and protesting, 
without knowing what the dread reality covered by 
his words might be : " It shall come to pass that 
everyone that findeth me shall slay me.'' If we 
could gather up all the unconscious utterances of 
future things recorded in the Bible and reported in 
the facts of human history, it would form a striking 
addition to the evidences we have collected. Good 
men, like Joseph, reporting beforehand the future 
changes of their lives; the acts of bad men fore- 
tokening their fall, as the gallows erected by Haman 
to be the prophecy of his death; fears, like the fear 
of Herod when he thought John the Baptist must 
be risen, foretokening by the phantoms raised a real 
and just retribution coming to redress his crimes; 
cold words of policy and cruel instigation like those 
of Caiaphas chiming with the voices of inspired 
prophets and foreshowing that Jesus shall die for 
the world — [one and all are coincidences of thought 
and word and action with events to come.] * 

We are brought on thus to a point where we can 

* The words in brackets are a condensation of an imperfect sen- 
tence. — Editor. 



UNCONSCIOUS PROPHECY 65 

see the closeness of our state to the future. It is 
one of the arts and also one of the mischiefs of our 
sin that it separates us from the future, and the 
future from us, in a degree that is even delusive. 
We stay in our memory and the things of the past 
as much as possible, because the matters of memory 
are matters of our own self-doing and our sin, even 
as Adam hid behind the trees when he heard the 
coming of the Lord. Under this kind of influence 
we become sceptical in regard to all knowledge of 
the future and intelligent apprehension of it. What 
we remember is certain — that we think we know. 
But it is scarcely credible that we should have any 
access to the future. Immortality even fades away 
into a thin shadow — who can be sure of it? And 
yet we have a nature full of anticipation, set to ap- 
prehend the future quite as fully and certainly as 
the past, falling into prophecy in ways unknown, 
reaching toward, longing after, coasting round the 
future in explorations of fancy, and struggling in 
half-suppressed endeavor to apprehend that for 
which it is apprehended. O, by what a might of 
longing is the young mind pressed to find what the 
future has for it! And this longing is the uncon- 
scious sense of its eternity, the prophet of its im- 
mortality. Hence it avails to the benefit of religion. 
Youth is the age that is not yet weaned from the 
future. Eternity lies close about it, and the fore- 
showing of the conscience and the imagination and 
the heart is believed. By-and-by the window^s that 
look before are shut up. We believe in nothing but 
memory. The future is ignored by a cold, delusive 



6Q UNCONSCIOUS PROPHECY 

scepticism, and we really think that nothing reliable 
can be told us of future things. If, like Caiaphas, 
we are every day uttering some prophecy in word 
or action that foretokens hours of grace and gifts 
of salvation, it avails no more to us than the death 
of Jesus to him. How plain it is in this subject 
that what we call our reason is our delusion, that 
we are made to seize and know and rest in future 
things, and that immortality itself, so poorly made 
out by the handling of our recollective stores, is the 
goal of our imagination, the rest of our aspirations, 
the certain fearful looking-for of our fears. O, if 
we could get clear of our chains and think it pos- 
sible to have a valid connection with the future as 
with the past, with the things of faith as with our 
own selfish doings, what a change would it make in 
our lives! 

Here, again, is the explanation of those convic- 
tions of sin which so often visit the uneasy mind 
of the race. How strangely do they come, bursting 
up out of unknown depths, speaking as it were out 
of silence, overcasting the sky for hours or days, and 
upbraiding the soul with not being what it was made 
to be. In one view these are recollections, back- 
ward and remorseful reaches of the soul. In an- 
other, they are all unconscious prophecies. The soul 
is here at a mid-point between the past and the 
future, feeling distinctly both. And these mute 
prophecies are all to be fulfilled. Call them phan- 
toms, disbelieve them if you will, dismiss them as 
you do, the certain fearful looking-for they raise 
will come to you hereafter in a revelation of fact 



UNCONSCIOUS PROPHECY 67 

not to be denied. The handwriting on the wall 
will be interpreted by realities that exclude am- 
biguity. 

Here also is discovered the reason of prophecy 
by inspiration, and of all those supernatural revela- 
tions of future things which compose the staple of 
the Holy Scriptures. Sin has torn us away as far 
as it could from the future and hidden it from us. 
God gave us a sufficient oracle, and set us in such 
a relation to all that is future that we could seize 
it as confidently as we could recollect the past. But 
we sundered the connection and, as far as we could 
do it, shut away the light of future things. Hence 
it was necessary to repair to the oracle. Therefore 
he gave us prophets, opened to us heaven and hell 
and reasserted immortality. I^or is anything more 
credible in this view than the word of his prophets, 
for it is only a restoration of the primal knowledge, 
and he lets his prophets show us things that come 
to pass here that we may believe them when they 
tell us of the things hereafter, and make their word 
a sure word of prophecy. Neither let us be scan- 
dalized that we hear the prophets speaking in a 
double sense — as David, for example, foreshadow- 
ing the things of Christ when he speaks to us of 
himself. For there was a force in their souls greater 
than they knew, a sense of things remote which 
gave a reach unknown to their words, the germ in 
what they felt of a great and glorious future. O, 
what a light has this oracle of prophecy and super- 
natural revelation kindled in this dark world, simply 
in the fact that it gives us back the lost future and 



68 UNCONSCIOUS PROPHECY 

sets Tis in a living connection with the great realities 
of God's kingdom ! It shows us things to come, and 
bids "US come up out of our charnel-house of dead 
memories to live in God's future. It shows us what 
the world is made for and what life is, by showing 
whither we are tending and what we are to be. The 
march of a great progress we distinctly hear. The 
triumph of truth we see approaching, and the king- 
dom of Christ drawing its lines of empire round the 
world. Eternity is set open, heaven and hell wide 
open. All we have to do and hope and fear, all 
that is signified in the grand problem of sin and re- 
demption is distinctly shown, so that now we can 
look forward and say that we see. And this brings 
us to the reason why the entrance of a Christian 
hope, as it is called, produces a joy so transcendent 
or even ecstatic. It is because the soul was before 
cut off from her future, and lived in the self-recol- 
lections of memory, a life more dry and desolate 
than she knew. . . . When a soul is born of 
God, it quits the field of dull recollections and bitter 
memories and begins to be a living creature. By 
hope it seizes on a glorious everlasting future and 
comes into possession of all the riches of God. Hav- 
ing found a real contact with and confidence of the 
future and come into the chime of harmony with 
all God's ways and works, it is as if it had found a 
translation. By a kind of holy exultation or ecstasy 
it is raised up to another plane of being. 'No greater 
change can be conceived. This is life, eternal life. 
You are beings made for the future, and separated 
from this you die. Therefore Christ has come to be 



UNCONSCIOUS PROPHECY 69 

in you the hope of glory, to make you, if you will 
but hear him and believe, possessors with him of his 
future, in a true sense sons of God and prophets — 
prophets in the eternal confidence and joy of hope. 



Ill 

GOD'S THOUGHTS FIT BKEAD FOR 
CHILDEEIST * 

How precious also are thy thoughts unto me, O God I 
how great is the sum of them ! — Psalm cxxxix. 17. 

It is a common fault of our preachings, teachings 
and faiths, that we take everything externally; as 
if beholding God from without, and only doing or 
thinking something about him. In the beautiful 
and glowing utterance of the divine singer, as here 
cited, it is not so. He had been thinking, as we see 
in the preceding verses, of the curiously wrought 
substance and organism of his own person; how his 
members were written out beforehand in the registry 
of God's book, when as yet imperfect; growing as it 
were in God's depths, even as the precious gems are 
distilled in the lowest parts of the earth. Where- 
upon, he breaks out, as one living among God's very 
thoughts themselves: ^' How precious also are thy 
thoughts unto me, O God! how great is the sum 
of them! " He does not go prosing about God as 
the architect and artificer of his frame, shaping him 
on the outside plastically by his hand ; but he beholds 

* Preached before the Connecticut Sunday-school Teachers' 
Convention, at the Pearl Street Congregational Church, Hartford, 
Tuesday evening, March 2, 1869. 

70 



GOD'S THOUGHTS 71 

himself and the dear gift of his body and spirit 
crystallizing, so to speak, in the bosom of God's 
fatherhood, meditated there and fashioned and curi- 
ously wrought. It is as if he grew in the womb of 
God's thoughts, and God's thoughts lived within him 
as he grew. 

Let us follow and develop, a little way farther, 
this interiorizing utterance and apostrophe of the 
Psalmist; and then we shall be ready, I trust, to 
gather in what we have learned upon our present 
occasion, setting it in close relation with all we have 
on hand, and making it a kind of institute in itself. 

Two points, in particular, invite our attention 
here: first, that God is a being who thinks — doing 
all deeds, creating all creations, appearing in all 
beauty, towering in all heights of excellence, by his 
thoughts, which are therefore infinitely precious; 
second, that there is a possibility and way of arriv- 
ing at the knowledge of God's thoughts, such as the 
Psalmist found, else how could they be so adoringly 
prized by him? 

I. God is a being who thinks and whose thoughts, 
being the creating powers of all good, are infinitely 
precious. Of course, being infinite and filling all 
space, he cannot be supposed to move or travel in 
space ; but the everlasting going on of thought with- 
in him is none the less possible. All the goings-on 
of things without do but represent, in fact, the eter- 
nal potentiality of his mind within. His immuta- 
bility is not, as the Eastern sophists imagined, the 
necessary cessation of thought, but is rather his im- 
mutable freedom and vitality in it. His greatness 



72 GOD'S THOUGHTS 

does not stifle his mind, leaving him to be blind Fate 
or still-born l^ature, or a great king-dreamer, 
Brahma, recumbent on the stars. In his word of rev- 
elation, he says indeed: ^^ For my thoughts are not 
as your thoughts; " but he means by this only that 
his thoughts are better, or perhaps full-formed and 
perfect; for there is no progress in his thinking, but 
only in the events he moves. He does not think 
distractedly, as we do under our sin; and then he 
does not infer, ascertain, compute, conjecture, or in 
that way learn anything. His memory recalls noth- 
ing, for nothing is absent. His internal movement 
is not a rill in which drop steals after drop, one 
single thought after another, but it is the sea con- 
taining all drops at once, a boundless fulness moving 
tidally with no drop lying dead and still. Holding 
this view, all events are at bottom his thought; and 
precisely here, in the stripping off of their external 
husk of commonness, we arrive at their secret poten- 
tiality and behold their preciousness. They have all 
God's dispositions moving back of them, God's plans 
contriving in them, God's beauty shaping them, 
God's patience waiting by them, God's justice filling 
their quiver with arrows, God's creations, provi- 
dences, spiritual visitations coursing inwardly 
through them; and so beholding in them, as it were, 
the secret distillations of God's bosom, they become, 
all, thoughts of God, — our precious things, our gems 
of knowledge, even as the diamonds curiously shaped 
and fashioned in the secret laboratories of the world, 
become a precious kind of dust, which we now call 
dust no longer. Every commonest event and thing 



FIT BREAD FOR CHILDREN 73 

has a base-work of divine thought and idea under it, 
in which it is precious. 

II. There is a possibility and way of arriving at 
God's thoughts, or the knowledge of them, in which 
we make a large stride of advance in our subject. 

In certain matters this point is readily and always 
perceived, even though we think of no such possi- 
bility in other things. We assume it, for example, 
as the test of all right thinking in matters of abso- 
lute truth and duty, that we think the thoughts of 
God. For there can be no two kinds of righteous- 
ness, truth, moral beauty, moral perfection: what- 
ever standard reigns in the mind of God must be 
standard law and verity to us. God's ideal law of 
right and truth is our ideal law of the same. ]^ot 
that every particular act seen to be conformed to 
right by God is infallibly seen to be by us, or that 
every particular affirmation seen to be true by him 
is infallibly seen to be by us. Under these ideals, 
God sees every particular rightness and trueness; 
whereas we distinguish the same only dimly and 
doubtfully. And yet, if we live rightly in or under 
these ideals and adhere to them faithfully, we shall 
be constantly gravitating toward the mind of God 
in all such particular matters, and shall come at last 
to think more and more closely the thoughts of God 
himself. Clouds of dust and grains of false mixture 
may partly obscure our seeing still, when they do 
not his, but we shall approximate him; and, as far 
as we may go, what is truth to us will be truth to 
him; and every good and pure emotion we may have 
will have the precise quality of his. What, in fact, 



Y4 GOD'S THOUGHTS 

can be more absurd than to suppose tbat we can 
tbink anytbing fit to be tbougbt, wbicb is contrary 
to or different from tbe tbinking of God ? And tbat, 
of course, implies tbat we may so far arrive at tbe 
tbougbts of God. 

And exactly tbis, I now go on to say, is wbat be 
means for us. For to tbis end, first of all, be cre- 
ates us in bis own image, giving us just sucb a mind 
as apart from wrong and sin tends naturally by its 
own internal law to tbink wbat be tbinks, — precisely 
tbat and notbing less. And tben be constitutes tbe 
creation itself so as to put our mind at scbool by bis 
own. Tbus we tbink out certain matbematical laws 
of circles; and we turn to tbe beavens wbere God 
bas bung out bis macbinery, and we find tbat bis 
notions of circles and tbeir laws correspond exactly 
witb ours and ours witb bis. Hence tbe ecstatic, 
balf -bewildered, gloriously rational outcry of Kep- 
ler, wben be puts bis problem finisbed on tbe stars 
and finds it exactly fit: ^^O God, I tbink tby tbougbts 
after tbee! " And just so tbe cbemist wben be goes 
down into tbe secret cbambers of matter, unyoking 
tbe atoms and recomposing tbem again by tbeir laws, 
finds tbem ready for new partnersbip only in tbe 
strictest laws of aritbmetic, so many of tbis kind 
witb so many of tbat in eternally fixed proportions; 
sbowing tbat God builds tbe eartbs and tbe stones 
in numbers and puts tbe atoms to scbool in tbem, 
even as we teacb our cbildren tbe same. And wbat 
are tbey doing tbus early in tbeir studies of aritb- 
metic but arriving, so far, at tbe tbougbts of God? 

We read tbe mind of God also on a broader scale 



FIT BREAD FOR CHILDREN Y5 

of perception when we take the natural expression 
of things. For they bear a look of meaning or in- 
telligence in their faces, and recite and sing as it 
were of God about us. His cloud, his thunder, his 
dew, the flush of his morning, the shadows of his 
evening, every form of beauty and plenty and glad- 
ness and power and terror discourses to our hearts' 
feeling somehow of feelings, dispositions, meanings, 
thoughts, somewhere, that are consciously not our 
own. And the lowest, dullest minds are caught by 
these impressions, — clowns, poetasters, poets, proph- 
ets, all are taken by them in their way. And yet 
there is a wonder more wonderful than this, viz., 
that every word of every human language is based, 
as every scholar knows, on some object or event nat- 
urally significant, provided for it in the grand uni- 
versal dictionary called the creation; in which we 
see that thought is in it everywhere. And whose 
thought is it that packs this dictionary, this immense 
word-factory of expression? God's, of course. 
" Day unto day uttereth speech ; night unto night 
showeth forth knowledge of him. There is no 
speech nor language where their voice is not heard." 
So far we go in arriving at God's thought, as we 
trace the interior laws and behold the exterior ex- 
pression of mere nature; far enough to see plainly 
that he is here permitting us and carefully training 
us to such deep interior acquaintance with himself. 
But we open now his supernatural word, his book of 
revelation, and our impression is not so much that 
we are arriving at God or the thoughts of God, as 
that they are arriving at us. In the very first chap- 



76 GOD'S THOUGHTS 

ter of the book where the creation-story begins, he 
allows US; as it were, to overhear him in the delib- 
erative council of his thoughts, saying: ^^ Let us 
make man in our image," etc., taking us back, so 
to speak, into the chambers of his eternity, where 
we may see him planning from a day before the 
world to have a family round him bearing his like- 
ness, and sharing, if they will, his blessedness. 'Next 
follows the dread fatality of sin, and the general un- 
doing by which our good possibilities are blasted. 
God's own verdict thereupon is, '^ that the imagina- 
tion of their thoughts is only evil, that they know 
not the thoughts of the Lord." Misthoughted now 
all through, filled with misruling passion, — hate, 
lust, proud self-worship, blind world-worship, — God 
engages here to recover us by a great supernatural 
salvation, and finally to recompose our life in his 
divine order, casting down imaginations and bring- 
ing our every thought into chime and coincidence 
with his own. 

Let us now ascend this bible stair and look on- 
ward, along down the lines of the story, and see how 
God's great thoughts are waiting and working for 
us in it, — waiting and working to be felt and wel- 
comed and become the law and blessing of our own 
time. This old-world history is not anything precious, 
viewed externally, but is only a very coarse mixture 
of idolatries, judgments, wars, barbarities : a religion 
shut up in formalities and transacted in a slaughter- 
yard of sacrifice, where gluttonous priests are watch- 
ing for their part of the meat; the civil history is 
wild and oppressive; the social is treacherous and 



FIT BREAD FOR CHILDREN 77 

cruel : and yet, if we go down under the externalities 
deep enough to find what God is meditating there, 
we shall say at every turn, '' How precious are thy 
thoughts! '' Underneath the outward story, we dis- 
tinguish signs that are preluding everywhere a gos- 
pel day. Enoch walks with God, till by God's lov- 
ing thought he is lifted and taken away. Abraham 
has found that God provides himself a lamb, and 
gotten full discovery thus of God's loving thought 
to him. Jacob has seen angels of God ascending 
and descending on him; and by that sacred telegra- 
phy had his communication with God. Moses has 
had his bush and put off there his shoes before him 
whose title of mystery is, I am that I am. Little 
Samuel has had his call ; and Isaiah has cried : "" Woe 
is me, for I have seen the King " ; and David has 
got so wonted in God's dispositions, purposes, sym- 
pathies, self-sacrificing patiences and meditations of 
mercy, that he prays by God's thoughts: ^^ Have 
mercy upon me, O God, according to thy loving 
kindness; according to the multitude of thy tender 
mercies blot out my transgressions." Meantime 
God is calling out all through the ages, himself, 
to the sottish people of transgression: '' Come, let us 
reason together." Come, that is, and put yourselves 
along-side of me, your mind by my mind, your 
thoughts by my thoughts, that we may think alike 
and be one forever. And so, if we take all these 
old books of story, biography and prophecy, and 
join ourselves to these old hymns of worship, we 
seem to be insphered among God's very thoughts, 
• — let in deep into the discerning of them. And we 



T8 GOD'S THOUGHTS 

are lifted by the swell of a certain deific undertone 
in them, which is the Eternal Mind heaving up 
through, in great inspirations and tides of thought 
that have no human measures. Somehow the 
" precious thoughts " have arrived and found dis- 
covery in us. 

'Now Sit last the fulness of time is come, and the 
New Testament chapter is opened. And here the 
remarkable thing is that every turn of the story is 
so palpably meant to give us God, and let us into 
the deepest possible discovery of his interior work- 
ing and thought. Trinity lies on the face of the 
story, and it is a most gloriously practical and grand 
use of the doctrine, not often observed either by 
those who believe in it or those who deny it, that it 
crowds all mind directly in upon the most search- 
ingly inward ways of viewing God. We cannot 
think him superficially now any more; but we must 
go far enough in, deep enough down, to be mining, 
as it were, in his nature. And then after this ante- 
chamber of mystery is passed, the remarkable thing 
is that everything divine is made so palpable, so ex- 
ceedingly clear. God is manifest in the flesh. In 
his human person Jesus is the incarnate word of the 
Father. By great works and all divinest charities 
he shows the precious thoughts and becomes the ex- 
press image of God's inmost mind. He has no difii- 
culty in saying: ^' 1 and my Father"; and as little 
in saying: "He that hath seen me hath seen the 
Father.'' Herein is love, herein are all God's dis- 
positions, all God's patiences, condescensions, ten- 
dernesses, forgivenesses, all the righteousness; and 



FIT BREAD FOR CHILDREN 79 

the sacrifice of the cross declares them as in one com- 
prehensive act of expression. God comes into open 
vision, so that an apostle is moved to say : " For God 
hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the 
knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus 
Christ.'^ And when he is declared as " the Lamb 
slain from the foundation of the world/' what are 
we to understand but that in God's previous eternity 
of thought and character there was a bleeding side 
of sacrificCj a cross, which John saluted when he 
recognized the lambhood of Jesus: ^^ Behold the 
Lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of the 
world"? And when he dies — this Lamb of God — 
how far in opens the gate upon God's inmost counsel 
and feeling! We behold the one great, world-for- 
giving thought, we are fully atoned, our gospel of 
life is born! 

N^othing more is wanted now but the gift of the 
Spirit, to come up from within, as Christ has come 
down from above, and be his interpreter in us, 
re-revealing Christ inwardly, as we believe in him, 
and helping us to believe in him by such inward rev- 
elation. And then how far off are we from the dis- 
covered thought of God, when the Spirit witnesseth 
with our spirit; when our natural man is gifted by 
him with a spiritual discerning of the things of God; 
when, not knowing what to pray for, the Spirit help- 
eth us, groaning silently in our groans, to mold our 
intercession for us according to the very thought 
and will of God ! And so, at last, as God is arriving 
at us, he makes our grace complete by putting spirit 
in our faith, that we may arrive at him. I^ow the 



80 GOD'S THOUGHTS 

discovery is full, and we are sealed by it everlast- 
ingly. God is no more beyond sea, that we must go 
after him, or above, that we may bring him down; 
but we have him in our mouth and in our heart and 
are of him forever. And this is our redemption. 

Are you now beginning, my friends, to ask what 
is all this for? Has it anything to do, and by any 
possibility what, with this particular occasion? My 
answer is that it has, and will be seen to have just 
everything to do with the occasion. The very de- 
sign I have in it is to corner in your minds a very 
important matter in which a whole great chapter of 
counsel will be opened. I bring you out here on 
this summit-level of the gospel, at a point where the 
day-star rises, and the day-bath of God's light floods 
all believing minds, that you may have a grand re- 
vision here, both of the matter which has called you 
together, and of yourselves as related to it. My 
design is to put our preaching and teaching ideas in 
measure with the real gospel, at its best and most 
central point of view. 

It appears to me, though perhaps I am wrong, that 
we hold this Sunday-school work in a very light way, 
such as demands a land of re-institution to put it on 
a right footing. The unfortunate word school ap- 
pears to let up, a good deal, the pressure of Christian 
ideas. Who teaches, in what manner, with how 
much or little responsibility, is not so much consid- 
ered, save by a specially conscientious few. And 
the work is a good deal secularized to the children; 
as if the making up of a good time for them were a 



FIT BREAD FOR CHILDREN 81 

considerable part of the plan. The jolly, no-relig- 
ion songs, the amusing stories and droll illustrations 
that illustrate nothing, the uncaring manner of the 
memorizing, school-training recitations, — all these 
produce, when taken together, an atmosphere of 
general unchristliness. As it was and still is the 
manner of parents to bring up their children for a 
future conversion, so the vice creeps in here of teach- 
ing only for some future benefit, and letting every- 
thing by consent stop short of touching the main 
thing. Palestine is taught, the mountains round 
about Jerusalem, Jerusalem about the temple and 
the cross, and all that is about God, but not God 
himself. It is not expected that the children will 
know God himself, but something about him. 

And there is, in fact, a secret assumption that no 
such thing is possible; or that the true knowledge of 
God as in friendship is possible to adults, but not 
to children; whereas, the real fact is that children 
are a great deal more capable of it. The boy-child, 
Samuel, could hear the call when old Eli could not. 
Children may not think the gospel experiences as 
well, but they can have them a great deal more 
easily. Tell the child how present God is, how lov- 
ing he is, how close by he is in all good thoughts, 
and he will take the sense a great deal better than 
the adult soul, that has gone a-doubting so far and 
speculated his mind half away in the false intellectu- 
alities miscalled reason. Ah! my friends, " Of 
these, of such is the kingdom of heaven." So Christ 
says, and we make almost nothing of it. These chil- 
dren can make room for more gospel than we, and 



82 GOD'S THOUGHTS 

take in all most precious thoughts of God more eas- 
ily. The very highest and most spiritual things are 
a great deal closer to them than to us. Let us not 
wonder and not be offended if they break out in 
hosannas on just looking in the face of Jesus, when 
the great multitude of priests and apostles are dumb 
along the road as the ass on which he rides. 

Consider next how much it means for us that we 
may teach from Jesus, having him revealed thought- 
wise in us in all the divine flavors of his life. As 
he came to draw men to himself, so we can draw; 
for we can bear him about visibly in our body 
and become each one a Jesus in our places. 
And we shall teach him to children thus, not 
by over-much digging at lessons, not by contrived 
arguments and made-up speeches. A great many, 
meaning to be faithful teachers, study too much, 
reason their way too hard, practise their inter- 
pretations too indefatigably, and run so far al- 
ways to arrive at Jesus that they never arrive. They 
come short, they faint for exhaustion; they get so 
many detentions upon them in the surroundings of 
Jesus, that they do not really find him much of the 
time, or come in where he is. 'No man teaches a 
gospel, whether in his pulpit or at his table or in 
his school, who does not know Jesus, and he cannot 
know Jesus out of any book by simply knowing the 
book, whether it be bible or anything else; but he 
must know the being, the very person: indeed he 
must become a Jesus in some very important sense, 
himself. And here again it will not be enough to 
go through some gusty phase of experience^ some 



FIT BREAD FOR CHILDREJST 83 

inward commotion, some turbulent heat, some vision 
of a flighty brain. You will fitly represent Jesus 
only when you are much with him, getting into his 
thoughts, and being carefully practised in them. 
You must be new-charactered in him, and that re- 
quires a great deal; a large meditation of the com- 
bined qualities that make up his beauty and set the 
equilibrium of his dignity, — his gentleness, unfear- 
ingness, impartiality, unsparing truth, deference to 
the humble, the burden of his sorrow, the love he 
seals by his death. If you had the whole four gos- 
pels at your tongue's end, if you understood all the 
occasions, times, conjunctions, harmonies, and had 
everything elaborated in most scientific terms of ar- 
gument, that would not qualify you. Simply to see 
Jesus in you, hear him in your voice, trace him in 
your patiences and charities, behold his gentleness 
in your walk, breathe his love in the flavors of your 
pure concern for godless men: this would signify 
more, preach more gospel, I might almost say, with- 
out a word beside. Your people, your house, your 
class, your school, living in such atmosphere, will 
have all Christly power upon them. 

Another great matter will thus be secured, viz., 
unity of impression. It is a great source of failure 
in the preachers and teachers that fail, that there is 
no constant element in their action and of course 
no unity in the impressions they raise. They do 
many things in as many moods; they get up new 
subjects, fine arguments, wonderful discoveries, all 
varieties of expedients, and go darting round hither 
and thither, full of industry and just as full of noth- 



84 GOD'S THOUGHTS 

ingness. If they raise a little effect of some kind 
to-day, it will only make room for some other kind 
of effect to-morrow; all because they are working 
under key, down among things or questions that are 
not in Christ, or up to Christ at all. Whereas you 
will observe that one who is really in the hidden life 
of God, one who abides there in God's peace and 
works from it, has a way of continuity and keeps 
on rolling his work steadily forward by a certain 
unity of meaning. He does not strain himself as 
hard as teachers often do, acting from a lower key; 
he will not do as brilliant things perhaps, or invent 
half as many expedients; but he will be filling this 
or that child's bosom with Christ simply because of 
what is in him. Something precious from God will 
appear to flavor all he does ; and that precious some- 
thing will be catching, as it were, in other minds by 
a law. ^^ How does he do it? " this and that other 
teacher and preacher will ask; and they never will 
find how, till they discover how all best power rests 
principally in what we are, and not in what we do. 
'No doing, at least, is of any great consequence which 
is not steadied and quickened by what we are. 

Sometimes the teacher who is not in and of God's 
thought, and knows not how to sing ^^How precious," 
will get visibly stalled in matters below the gospel, 
— questions of bible antiquities, questions of geogra- 
phy, questions of commentary, questions of opinions, 
travels, chronologies, all of which may have a genu- 
ine interest and importance; but the misery is that 
it is so easy for him to stop in these matters, and 
build tabernacles there which Moses and Elias and 



FIT BREAD FOR CHILDREN 85 

Christ will not care to occupy. Some will be want- 
ing so much to be popular with their class and will 
do so many things for it^ that they become subservi- 
ent and the class shortly has them in its power. 
Others will be so intent on results as to quite weary 
out their pupils by over-much personal talk and in- 
tercession. O, if they could only be one degree 
fuller of the precious things, and let their simple 
fulness talk by its own silent flavors of sweetness and 
joy! That has no dinning in it; that will not ham- 
mer out the patience even of a child. 

In all these matters now, and a thousand others 
which could be named, false aims, false means, false 
manners will be rectified, almost of course, if only 
the teacher is a saint or believer who has been set, 
or is now trying to be, in God's full equipment. If 
he truly lives with Christ and with God on the foot- 
ing of a joyous friendship and full private acquaint- 
ance, he will have a certain divine propriety in him, 
and God's silent dew will be distilling on everything 
he does. 

But there are two very important matters, of a 
more general nature, that now ask your attention 
here, as in full view of a subject that presents the 
very highest, most spiritual, and most inwardly per- 
ceptive notions of Christian experience. One is 
this: Is there any modified way of organization or 
exercise that may do more than simply teach the 
classes matters about God, — that will bring them in 
to know God himself? If we do not fear to drop the 
word ^' conversion," as a word more proper to the 
conditions of adult minds, is there any way of 



86 GOD'S THOUGHTS 

in-Christing childish minds so immediate as to put 
them at one with him by their direct impressions? 
Of course they Avill be converts in reality, but not as 
beheld in their external demonstrations. 

I believe that there is a way of doing just this. 
The Moravians train their children largely by the 
singing of hymns that centre in Christ and true 
Christ-worship. So, dismissing partly the idea of a 
school and organizing a discipleship in hosannas, we 
may put our children through songs of the Lamb — 
chants, litanies, sonnets, holy madrigals and doxolo- 
gies, — such and so many, and so full of Christ's dear 
love, that they will sing Christ into their very hearts, 
and be inwardly imbued and quickened by him. At 
the same time there will be rehearsed, with these, 
scripture lessons that have the sense of God's au- 
thority and power and forgiveness and divine pastor- 
ship and child-cherishing friendship in them; every- 
thing, in short, that most appreciates God and the 
precious thoughts of God; everything that belongs 
to a penitent, adoring, tender, faithfully kept, pa- 
tiently enduring, bravely steadfast, gloriously trust- 
ful character. And these rehearsed responsively 
or by all together, and blended with high song, will 
make up a taking-in exercise, whereby Christ will be 
entered more and more deeply into the secret life of 
the children. For observe that whoever hears or is 
taught something is only put on consideration, or 
helped into consideration, by the matter received; 
whereas the worshipping, praying, praising soul is 
put as far as possible into the very life of the senti- 
ments rehearsed. "We may teach about God and 



FIT BREAD FOR CHILDRElSr 87 

Christ altogether too much, putting our teachings 
in the way of a due receiving. But if we come 
in with our children, full of worship ourselves, and 
open out our souls into that which waits to be opened 
into theirs, how receptive will they be, and how cer- 
tainly will they sing the songs and pray the confes- 
sions and prayers into the deepest lodgements of 
their nature! We shall not have a small trained 
choir of singing boys to entertain or move the 
grown-up people in attendance; but we shall have 
a beautiful assembly of singing boys and girls offer- 
ing their own hosannas to the Lamb, and he fast by 
them, waiting to be graciously installed in the chorus 
they sing to his name. Have we nothing to learn, 
nothing to gain, by a reconsideration of this whole 
matter? Is it our wisdom to lay everything on 
teaching, and set everything we do upon the score 
of private judgment, saying: "There, we have 
taught you how it is, and now you must be wise for 
yourselves." Have we not a more excellent way? 
And if we take our afternoons regularly for this kind 
of exercise, and have it as a common church priv- 
ilege for all, will it not be quite as common, and 
quite as much valued as if we were all become chil- 
dren together? At any rate, we should know what 
it means, that " of such is the kingdom of heaven " ; 
for the kingdom would be there. 

A single thought more, in which I will be brief, 
though it asks a large discussion. Is it not our priv- 
ilege and duty, as preachers of Christ, to do more 
preaching to children? I think of nothing in my 
own ministry with so much regret and so little re- 



88 GOD'S THOUGHTS 

spect as I do of my omissions here. "We get occu- 
pied with great and high subjects that require a 
handling too heavy and deep for children, and be- 
come so fooled in our estimate of what we do, that 
we call it coming down when we undertake the 
preaching to children; whereas it is coming up 
rather, out of the subterranean hells, darknesses, in- 
tricacies, dungeon-life profundities of old, grown-up 
sin, to speak to the bright daylight creatures of trust 
and sweet affinities and easy conviction. And to 
speak to these fitly, so as not to thrust in Jesus on 
them as by force, but have him win his own dear 
way by his childhood already waiting for his cross, 
tenderly, purely and without art, — O, how fine, how 
very precious the soul equipment it will require of 
us ! I think I see it now clearly : we do not preach 
well to adults, because we do not preach or learn 
how to preach to children. Jesus did not forget to 
be a child; but if he had been a child with us we 
should probably have missed the sight of him. God's 
world contains grown-up people and children to- 
gether: our world contains grown-up people only. 
And preaching only to these, who are scarcely more 
than half the total number, it is much as if we were 
to set our ministry to a preaching only to bachelors. 
"We dry up in this manner, and our thought wizens 
in a certain pomp of pretence that is hollow and not 
gospel. The very certain fact is that our schools 
of theology will never make qualified preachers till 
they discover the existence of children. Let every 
young man who is going to preach put himself to it, 
first of all, in that afternoon service we just now 



FIT BREAD FOR CHILDREN 89 

spoke of, there to begin a ministry wise enough and 
rich enough in gospel meaning to take the heart of 
children. 

Some of us, I know, will say that they have, alas ! 
too much thinking to do for this other exercise. It 
puts them to the strain and shapes their habit, and 
how can they unstring their bow? Yes, brethren, 
we have all much thinking to do; but if we are up 
among God's thoughts it will not strain us to think 
them, and scarcely more to have ascended the level 
where they are. Up through all created being and 
scripture knowledge we shall be climbing, out of all 
darkness and obscurity, mounting fast and far tow- 
ard the light; we shall go steadily over the rough 
hills of obstruction; we shall ascend the highest 
peaks to watch for the day; and when we see the 
east begin to be streaked with gray, the gray chang- 
ing into purple, and the purple into gold, shall it not 
be much that if we have our children with us, they 
will see God's light as clearly and be as glad in it 
as we? 



TV 
A GEEAT LIFE BEGmS EARLY* 

O God, thou hast taught me from my youth, and 
hitherto have I declared thy wondrous works. — Psalm 
Ixxi. 17. 

Xenophon writes what are called the Memorabilia 
of Socrates, recording for tlie benefit of future ages 
the remarkable acts, conversations, characteristics 
and personal fortunes of this great teacher of man- 
kind. The Memorabilia of David are not less re- 
markable, but he does not think of them as pertain- 
ing at all to himself; he calls them " wondrous 
works," instead, of God, and goes on publishing and 
celebrating them in hymns of praise from the be- 
ginning of his wonderful career to the end. He is 
now an old man, " old and gray-headed," as he 
writes in the next verse of his psalm, and reverting 
here in thought to his early youth and retracing the 
steps by which he has risen from a mere shepherd- 
boy to the kingdom, raising also the kingdom with 
him by his military successes to a rank among the 
great monarchies, he distinguishes God in every 

* Preached in the North Church, Hartford, March, 1852. 

In offering this sermon as it stands, it is not thought that the 
references to the life of David lose their value as illustrations of 
the subject through their lack of harmony with recent biblical 
criticism, — Editor. 

90 



A GREAT LIFE BEGINS EARLY 91 

turn of his marvellous and sublime history, and cries, 
^' O God, thou hast taught me from my youth, and 
hitherto have I declared thy wondrous works." He 
appears also in this language, as I think you will 
perceive, to advert to his musical and lyric inspira- 
tions, as if God had not only been his public guide 
and preserver, but his teacher and the power of a 
higher utterance in his heart, so that he has come 
on singing all the way, as by a divine music within, 
of the wondrous works of God and his divine provi- 
dence without. It seemed to him that his whole life 
up to this time had been a kind of lyric strain, in 
which the wondrous works of God had simply made 
use of him to celebrate and sing their own history. 

It would occupy me too long and take me away 
from my purpose to make out a sketch of this very 
wonderful history. Suffice it to say that he begins 
a shepherd and ends a king, and that as he was able 
to enlarge the kingdom by his military prowess to 
such a degree as to become in a sense its founder, 
so in a similar sense he founded the metropolis and 
temple of his religion, and in a like degree founded 
and became the king of a new literary era in his 
nation. For God, teaching him from within, so 
brought on his genius from his simple beginnings 
with a shepherd's pipe that he became, despite all the 
rough adventures and turmoils and public cares of 
his life, the first lyric poet of his nation and, in some 
respects of the world. He could not understand his 
own way or God's way with him; it was a mystery, a 
chapter of ^^ wondrous works," and all that he could 
do was to keep singing it, as in that boldest, most 



92 A GREAT LIFE 

sublime of all celebrations of personal history, the 
ISth Psalm. 

The truth which I derive from the experience of 
this very remarkable man, and which I propose at 
the present time to illustrate, is this : 

That a life taugJit of God from youth omvard will 
he a life distinguished hy wondrous worhs, or, what 
is the same, by events, characteristics and turns of 
advancement that are both honorable and remark- 
able. 

To unfold and rightly conceive this truth, we need 
to notice and make due account of the fact that there 
are a great many ways of being advanced, and a 
great many different characteristics and successes in 
which one may be distinguished. God will not make 
every young shepherd who loves him a king or a 
poet. That will depend on the times or the places 
God has to fill, and the talents and powers of the 
subject himself. And yet he will make everyone 
who is willing to be taught by him from early youth, 
and who grows up thus in his teaching, remarkable 
in some way. Some of the most remarkable people 
in the world are those who live a somewhat private 
and obscure life and are not distinguished in any 
manner by their talents. I have never known a 
case of deep, unaffected, habitual piety, where the 
friendship of God has for a long course of years been 
the element of life, where the person did not come 
to be regarded as a remarkable person. It is partly 
because God leads on such persons through provi- 
dences and spiritual experiences that are remarkable, 
both to others and to themselves; partly because of 



BEGINS EARLY 93 

tlie ennobled and purified character formed in them 
and the Christian wisdom of their conversation; 
partly because of the good turns, the successes, the 
daily bread supplies, or the joy and comfort that 
seem to invest them in their lot of pain or privation. 
They will be spoken of, there will be many that love 
to hear them, many that go to catch the spirit of 
their faith. And they will be a far greater wonder 
to themselves than to others, for it is one of the 
transcendent and sublime joys of a life in God that 
it is all made up of wondrous works. Greater bat- 
tles are fought, greater kingdoms won, sublimer 
hymns are sung in their hearts than those which 
made the wonder of David's outward history. They 
see God in everything that befalls them, and that 
makes everything great. God is leading them on 
through a great history. And there is so much in 
this that it imparts an air of sublimity to their ex- 
pressions and their character. While their own life- 
plan, as a plan of God, is unfolding to them like the 
chapters of an epic, a wondrous work of God in 
every part, they are raised above all princes of the 
earth in the conscious pitch of their exaltation. But 
I mean, by a life that is taught of God from its youth, 
something more than a simply credible piety or a 
fair repute of religion. I mean a life that is prac- 
tically yielded up to God, dwelt in by God, living 
in him as an element, and growing up thus from the 
ground to flower and bear fruit in him. A religious 
character which still is not religious must needs be 
a very insipid character. But when religion takes 
genuine hold of the life, to shape it from the begin- 



94 A GREAT LIFE 

ning and make it a real intimacy with God, then it 
will be a wondrous work and a song in every part. 
Never will it fail to unfold the divine beauty and 
power in such acts, successes, experiences and char- 
acteristics as to render it impressive and remarkable. 
We need, in order to a right impression of this 
subject, to conceive the fact that the world in all 
its employments and spheres of life is a university, 
and that life is designed to be a training process for 
us all. We are so much governed by words as to 
forget, or even to think it impossible, that men have 
any advantages for learning or unfolding spiritual 
power who are not in schools or colleges or learned 
professions. But the truth is that every calling, 
work, appointment is so far a school, that if it is 
rightly filled it will bring on the man or woman or 
child or even slave that fills it. 'No matter what our 
sphere is, we shall be improved and raised by it. If 
it is the calling of a shepherd, that calling will be a 
university in the fields, where the youth will flame 
up into a lyric poet after the manner of David, or 
burst forth like Amos in the visions of a seer. If it 
is that of a page or a cupbearer, then it will turn 
out a N^ehemiah to be the restorer and liberator of 
his country, or a Daniel to be the chief minister of 
a kingdom. If it is that of a shoemaker, it will give 
the world a Boehmen, or if it is that of a tinker it 
will yield a Bunyan. I mean that something will 
come that we shall love to look upon as one of God's 
gifts to the world, and something great and happy 
and wonderful and fit to be a song of praise. And 
we shall the more readily believe this if we make 



BEGINS EARLY 95 

due account of the fact that, while the world is a 
university in all its spheres and callings, so God is 
the leader in it. He built the world to school us 
and train us up in it, and he undertakes himself to 
be the schoolmaster. He is not only mindful of us, 
visiting us occasionally to see what progress we 
make, but he is with us continually, pervading us 
within, unfolding us from within. He calls out our 
powers, modulates our tempers, shapes and fortifies 
our principles, enlightens and irradiates our judg- 
ments, sets up aims to inspire us and objects to kin- 
dle our hopes, and so he draws us on to a good and 
fruitful and happy life. He will teach us in a man- 
ner so complete and careful that we shall be guided 
into the best field, set in the nicest harmony with his 
providence, made the most of, most lifted in con- 
sciousness, and we shall sing with highest joy: ^^ It 
is God that girdeth me with strength and maketh 
my way perfect." O, if it be much to be instructed 
by the best professors and most learned doctors of 
science in the world, how much more does it signify 
to be under the teaching of the all-perfect, all-know- 
ing, all-beautiful God, a being who can touch every 
spring of action, irradiate every darkness, ennoble 
and purify every feeling and impart himself to the 
glorified consciousness of the soul! And this is the 
privilege of training received by every person, in 
whatever sphere of life, who is taught of God from 
his youth. 

Moreover, we must make due account of the fact 
that the teaching of God of which we are speaking 
begins early, or in youth. God took David into his 



96 A GREAT LIFE 

teaching as a sliepherd-boy in the fields, and there be- 
gan to call out his genins and prepare his wondrous 
history. And so he entered into life, as it were, in 
the spirit and power of God, a man who was pre- 
pared in that manner to all the successes and fort- 
unes of his history. But he had no conception that 
a life of faith and piety begun at a later point in life 
could have had any such effect — that he could have 
been taken, for example, at middle life and raised 
from a plain rustic into a king or the first poet of 
his language. His thought is different; he perceives 
and means to say that it was God's teaching in his 
youth, when his soul was capable of the divine fire 
and the heat and glory of a divine love, that brought 
him on in this manner. And this we know our- 
selves. A young person will easily acquire a lan- 
guage or form a style or establish an exact intel- 
lectual discipline, but at a later period it becomes 
more difficult and, ere long, a kind of impossibility. 
Indeed, a man cannot even learn a correct and com- 
petent business habit unless he begins young. ITo 
teaching or training really saturates the nature and 
fills it, except that which is begun early. What is 
received farther on, after what we call the bent is 
fixed, is partial and has only a partial sway over the 
character. Hence we are to look for a very differ- 
ent class of results when a person is really given up 
to God's teaching in youth. If then, at that early 
period when the soul is pliant to influence, God may 
truly possess it and have it under his teaching, the 
most will be made of it. There comes out such a 
character as Joseph, a flower of divine beauty whose 



BEGINS EARLY 97 

blossom Providence will itself ripen and bring on 
to its fruit. Or it will be a second David, or Daniel, 
or Amos; or a Pascal, a Cromwell, an Edwards, or a 
"Wesley. These were all brought under God's teach- 
ings at an early period, though not all in their child- 
hood. Indeed, I have found it diflS.cult to recall any 
example of a man who was really lifted and made 
to see the wondrous works of God in himself, who 
began to be taught of God even as late as middle 
life. Among all the great disciples, I know not one 
such example. Religion never does its will com- 
pletely in a man, or so as to prove its power, unless 
it can have its way in childhood or youth. 

Again, it is a great point in the teachings of God 
that he is able to impart an abiding impulse or in- 
spiration to the soul which no other teacher can. 
This is the great difficulty in all teaching, to rouse 
the pupil, to quicken a purpose or beget a worthy 
enthusiasm in him, and set him on upon life with an 
object and courage to go after it. O, how many dull, 
earthy, sensual or spiritless souls are there in the 
schools, that can never be started with any high- 
minded and good impulse! But you will never see 
a young Christian who comes up into life as one of 
God's pupils, who has not a good living impulse in 
him, something to live for, courage, inspiration to 
go forward and battle his way through. Nor does 
it make any difference whether the person is distin- 
guished for capacity or position in life. If he is an 
apprentice, obscure, uneducated, not highly gifted, 
yet if he becomes thoroughly saturated with religion 
or God's teachings he will have impulse and inspira- 



9S A GREAT LIFE 

tion. He will liave something on hand to do, and 
a real courage or inspiration of divine energy to do 
it. Let religion or the faith of God have hold of 
him long enough and fully enough to saturate his 
powers and fill him practically with its sovereign in- 
fluence, and it will kindle such a fire in him as to 
exalt every capacity he has to its utmost pitch of 
vigor. 

Once more it is a great matter as regards this 
teaching of God that he does not stop, but is able to 
go on with his pupil and bring along just the occa- 
sions that will most help him or promote his ad- 
vancement. See how it was with Joseph; it was 
just as if he were the child of Providence and every- 
thing were to be turned so as to set him forward — 
the dream, the jealousy of his brothers, the caravan 
of Ishmaelites to whom he was sold, the wicked art 
of his master's wife, the famine of Egypt, the honors 
of a viceroy in the kingdom, all these came along in 
order as if they were occasions and conditions meant 
for him. David rose in the same manner; as if the 
sheep, the lion and the bear and Goliath and the 
kingdom, and the lyre that kept him company in all, 
were made expressly for the bringing out of this 
wonderful pupil of the Almighty. So with Daniel; 
it would even seem as if E'ebuchadnezzar and Bel- 
shazzar and Darius were made as truly for Daniel's 
manhood, as the pulse and cold water of temperance 
for the growth and ruddy countenance and the clear- 
headed scholarship of his childhood. God is able to 
give his pupils just what they want to send them on, 
or to exalt and glorify them. They never graduate 



BEGINS EARLY 99 

until they die, but lie goes on with them, turning all 
their occasions, yielding them the sublime conviction 
that their life is a plan and a purpose of his, and 
enabling them to sing even to the last: "Hitherto 
have I declared thy wondrous works." O, how 
wondrous a thing is a life that is shaped by God, and 
consciously lived in his mysterious will! Take, for 
example, such a history as that of Cromwell, en- 
veloped in his own sight wholly in God's counsel, 
rolled on over the heads of precedent, over church 
and parliament, like a chariot of wrath sent forth 
from God — how great a mystery is such a man to 
himself, a wondrous work of God; not less won- 
drous now but more sublime, if he could see its 
steady roll of power and the tremendous issues God 
is bringing out of it, and the respect in which the 
coming ages are to bow to his name as a champion 
of liberty and religion. 

In drawing this subject to a conclusion I remark 
that young persons, who only think of piety as want- 
ing it to be saved by, are in a great mistake. They 
might almost as well think of an education as some- 
thing which they want to die by. 'No, the great 
first point of Christian character is that it is want- 
ed for the success and happiness and the ennobled 
consciousness of this present life. As God never 
made an eye which was not made for the sun, so he 
never made a soul which was not made to partake 
his light, and be trained up and guided by him. And 
so much is there in this principle that a great part 
of the failures that come to pass in men's plans, by 
a defect of talent as we think, would never have 



100 A GREAT LIFE 

happened^ if tlie talents possessed had been brouglit 
out by God's teacbing and the inspiring impulse de- 
rived from being thoroughly in his love. Tor what 
power of thought or feeling or purpose, what ele- 
ment of courage or principle of prudence, what 
capacity of great action or command or impression, 
what spring of impulse or devotion, what fire of art 
or genius, what one talent or gift of any human soul 
does not want the proximity and the manifestation 
of his divinity within to fill out and purify and poise 
it for its work? And then how much more evident 
is it that a man, going out into this great world to 
act his part in it, wants a guide who knows it and 
will set him ever in his way. How weak a thing is 
human discernment or human prudence to a being 
out upon such an ocean as this, so vast, so girt about 
with quicksands, so thickly studded with jutting 
rocks and islands, so blanketed with darkness and 
the rage of its storms. 'No, my friends, it is not the 
only need you have of God that you want his accept- 
ance hereafter. You want him even more press- 
ingly here, want him to be nigh you by his glorious 
proximity, want his guidance, want to be in his plans, 
and admitted as a link in the golden chain of his 
wondrous works. 

"We discover in this subject why it is that so many 
complain of the insipidity of life. Life is always 
insipid to those that have no great works in hand, or 
no lofty aims to elevate their feeling. The greater 
part of mankind, almost all such as are not deep in 
the life of religion, grow weary and sick and show 
by their uneasiness how destitute they are of any 
proper relish of satisfaction in their experiences. 



BEGINS EARLY 101 

They are like fish gasping in the air, or insects in a 
vacuum. Life is and always must be a most insipid 
experience, till it is raised high enough and brought 
close enough to God to be in his teaching and fixed 
in his great ends. Then it is high, then it has a 
meaning and a relish and becomes a joy that is fit to 
be sung. What is it to eat and sleep and have a 
little business and gain a little money and see a little 
society? What is this to live for? ■ My young 
friends, there is something better for you than this, 
and you can have it. God has a place for you, God 
waits to teach and lead you on. Come over to him, 
to abide really in him, and you shall have a life of 
wondrous works, full of zest, elevated, serene, lu- 
minous and clear, participant even of God himself. 

We have discovered why it is that humble Chris- 
tians are accustomed to speak of so many wonders 
in their experience. It is because they are so com- 
pletely in God that their life becomes a divine plan 
or chapter, which they hang over even as spectators 
and watch the process of. It does not seem to be 
themselves alone but another that they are conscious 
of, a kind of other and divine self; and while tracing 
his mysterious will in them and the unfolding of his 
plan, they feel it to be a wonder great and holy. 
'Now there is no real sense of elevation to anyone 
in mere self-consciousness, but if you live in the 
touch or contact of the infinite, conscious even of 
God in his inward manifestation, that makes every- 
thing great, every experience a wonder. And then 
it matters little where you are externally — whether 
in a hovel or a palace, whether you are a slave or 
a king — you are living in a great life, everything is 



102 A GREAT LIFE BEGINS EARLY 

divine, a wondrous and holy work of God. To be 
in God, even if it be to suffer, is to have a great 
experience, and if you look within, it is to have a 
kind of heroic elevation of soul — just what you see 
in the humblest examples of the true little ones of 
God. 

Finally, we see that Christian piety should have 
the earliest possible beginning, and then it should be 
so earnest and complete in its power as to bring the 
whole character and life under its domain. My 
young friends, let me urge it upon you that you 
make no feint of it, that you determine to live just 
such a life as God will plan you. Yield yourselves 
up to the complete sway and the perfect teaching of 
God. Do it now, do it from the first, and keep your- 
selves in that mind to the end, and make no doubt of 
this, that God's plan for you will be a good one and 
his work a work more wondrous and glorious than 
you can either execute or think. 

If you want a happy life, a great life, a life that 
shall be a song, then it must be a Christian, wholly 
and completely Christian, not a partially Christian, 
life, such as you will graft upon the old hard tim- 
ber of a youth spent in sin by some late repentance, 
but such a life as you can have only when you give 
the dew of your youth to God. This now you can, 
a little farther on and you cannot — the privilege is 
gone. May God reveal this wisdom to you and 
write it in your heart, that it may be yours in the 
years when your sun is sinking to look back over a 
good and great life and sing: " O God, thou hast 
taught me from my youth, and hitherto have I de- 
clared thy wondrous works," 



OUK BEST WEAPOE^S GOTTEl^ BY 
CO^nTQUEST* 

And the priest said, The sword of Goliath the Philis- 
tine, whom thou slewest in the valley of Elah, behold, it 
is here wrapped in a cloth behind the ephod : if thou wilt 
take that, take it : for there is no other save that here. 
And David said, There is none like that ; give it me. — 
1 Sam. xxi. 9. 

It was the custom of the ancients to hang up in 
the temples of their gods as consecrated trophies 
the shields, swords, standards and other implements 
of war taken from their enemies in battle. This 
custom obtained among the Jews in common with 
the heathen nations, and David, in accordance with 
the custom, after his combat with the Philistine 
giant, had taken his sword and hung it up as a 
trophy in the Lord's house at !Nob, the sacerdotal 
city of Ephraim. 

At a later time, when fleeing from Saul as an out- 
law, he comes unarmed to Abimelech, the priest of 
iN'ob, asking for some kind of weapon as armor. 
The aged priest replies in the text that he has no 
armor save David's own consecrated trophy, the 
sword that he himself had taken from Goliath and 

* Preached in the North Church, Hartford, in August, 1848. 
103 



104: OUR BEST WEAPONS 

deposited as a votive offering in the Lord's house: 
" If thou wilt take that, take it : for there is no other 
save that here.'' Ah, that is the sword of Provi- 
dence already. "What more or better could he ask 
than that? His heart leaps eagerly to seize it: 
" There is none like that; give it me." 

So he took the weapon and set off again in his 
flight, to cut his way out through all dangers and 
surrounding foes, till that holy Providence whose 
sword he wielded brought him to the throne of Is- 
rael. And if we could follow him in the strange 
adventures and wild exploits of his outlaw state we 
should see him cheering his courage always and 
nerving his arm by this sacred talisman of victory, 
the sword of Goliath. With this in his hand he 
headed his little company in the storming of Keilah, 
and took it from the Philistines. With this he pur- 
sued the Amalekites to recover his family and the 
spoil of Teklag. This too hung at his side, we may 
believe, when he cut off the skirt of Saul in the cave 
of Adullam, and again afterward when he stole into 
Saul's camp at night and took away the cruse and 
the spear from his pillow. When his hand touched 
the hilt of this, it was strong. When it rattled by 
his side among the rocks and woods of Hachilah, the 
sound was music in his ear and victory in his arm. 
Never could he look on it or touch it or hear it 
rattle in the scabbard without saying in himself: 
" There is none like this, the sword of Goliath, the 
Lord's token of power and victory." 

The same thing we shall find holds good in mat- 
ters spiritual, and I offer it accordingly as a prin- 



GOTTEN. BY CONQUEST 105 

ciple never to be forgotten, tliat there is no so good 
weapon for a Christian as that which he has gotten 
hy his own personal victories. Whenever he has 
gained any one victory, it is the sword of a Goliath 
in his hand wherewith to carry other and greater 
victories. 

We shall settle ourselves into this principle most 
firmly by observing first with a little care the in- 
stances or illustrations of its efiicacy continually dis- 
played in the matters of common life. 

There is nothing more infrequent in the annals 
of war than the losing of a victory, after once the 
enemy's guns have been taken at some great point 
in the field and turned upon himself. After that 
one party fights as a victor and the other as van- 
quished, and the result is not doubtful. We also 
know what indomitable fire it has several times given 
our countrymen, when upon the sea they have 
fought the enemy in ships taken from him in 
recent battles. ^N^apoleon appealed to the same 
kind of sentiment when he built his towering monu- 
ment of victory out of the brass cannon taken in 
the campaigns of Italy and Austria, designing by 
that brazen trophy to assure the French people in 
coming ages of their martial capacity and to fire 
the consciousness of invincibility in their bosoms. 
History, I need hardly add, is full of examples in 
which armies have been nerved to achievements, hu- 
manly speaking impossible, by simply finding in their 
hands weapons taken from their enemy in the fields 
of yesterday. 

The same thing is exemplified also more quietly 



106 OUR BEST WEAPONS 

but not less convincingly in the struggles of learning 
and science. The problem of the falling apple, once 
solved, gives courage to scale the firmament itself 
and furnishes the ladder besides, for this one truth 
is a weapon conquered strong enough to conquer 
even the physical universe. Thus it is that one dis- 
covery or invention always prepares another. Thus 
it is that the little triumphs of the nursery or the 
school prepare the higher triumphs of the manly 
scholar, for everything done that awakens the sense 
of power leads in all the victories that come after. 
One song makes the great poet, one speech the great 
orator, because in that song or speech the man first 
discovers himself. 

The same thing is observed in a form even more 
familiar in the matter of acquisition. Beginning at 
the point of poverty, as many of the most successful 
do, it seems to be even impossible to get a recognized 
place in the great world of business. The aspirant 
has neither credit nor friends to help him. I^othing 
helps him, everything conspires to hold him down. 
But by dint of much patience he finally helps him- 
self. He establishes a character, gathers a little 
fund of capital, and these are weapons that, once 
gotten, assure him of the future victories. He takes 
confidence, grows conscious of power, comes into 
position gradually as a man of promise and capacity, 
and friends gather round him to cheer him on. The 
sword of Providence is now in his hand, acquisition 
is easy, and he goes on with his advances, rapidly 
extending his enterprises and enlarging his rev- 
enues till at length markets, banks, and all the 



GOTTEN BY CONQUEST 107 

great engines of commercial power become his trib- 
utaries. 

What I now undertake to say is that Christian 
success follows the same law as other kinds of suc- 
cess in the natural life. And exactly this, if I un- 
derstand him aright, is the Saviour's meaning when 
he propounds it as the great law of Providence that 
to him that hath shall be given. He gives it as a law 
not peculiar to Christian advances, but as a law uni- 
versal. It is not that he has, in arbitrary sover- 
eignty, determined to bestow his favors where they 
are least needed. He only declares what is the nat- 
ure of power universally. God has made it the re- 
ward, he says, of industry, courage and duty that 
the more a man has conquered the more he may. 
The advances he makes shall be the weapons of his 
future success. To him that hath shall be given, 
and he shall have more abundantly. 

E'ow the whole scheme of the Christian life, as 
we may see, is that of a warfare, and the soldier is 
to get his power by his victories. Every giant van- 
quished yields up his sword to the victor and arms 
him to vanquish again. And so Apollyon, Giant 
Despair, and all the monsters that assault him shall 
be put to flight and chased back to their dens. 

I do not mean, of course, that the Christian is to 
create his own power in this manner. He triumphs 
always in a divine power, and the essence of his 
triumph is that he is learning in it how to be em- 
powered by a force not his own. And when he goes 
to a second encounter, cheering his heart by the re- 
membrance of a first victory already gained, the very 



108 OUR BEST WEAPONS 

power of the remembrance is that he there had evi- 
dence so glorious of God's conspiring help and was 
accepted to be his soldier. He takes the sword 
wrested from his enemy, saying, " There is none 
like that " ; but he says it in no spirit of mere human 
glorying, but as having there discovered what God 
will enable him to do. The very strength he feels 
comes of the awakened confidence that God is with 
him. 

Indeed, every victory gained by a Christian will 
be itself a victory of faith or dependence. Prayer, 
when prevailing, is represented in the story of Jacob 
as a hard grapple of confidence, in which the patri- 
arch refuses to be worsted and is finally crowned as 
a prince on the field. And so he was only further 
inducted into faith and conquered new ability in 
prayer. How else, indeed, do we ever become able 
to prevail in prayer except by prevailing. One suc- 
cess strengthens us for another. Pressing our suit 
successfully in some inferior matter where it is 
easier to believe, we obtain faith and confidence to 
ask more and be more importunate. We are able 
to prevail just because we have prevailed. 

The same is true in regard to our trust in God's 
promises and pledges. Having proved them yester- 
day we can trust them more implicitly to-day. If 
we had a struggle yesterday to hold ourselves to a 
practical belief of some promise, we can rest our- 
selves on a higher promise to-day without any strug" 
gle at all. We are thus, by trusting God, proving 
the reality and verity of his government, conquering 
our own doubts and arming our soul in the divine 



GOTTEN BY CONQUEST 109 

government as a panoply. A settled confidence 
grows up thus out of our successes that Providence 
is with us and that all God's promises are Yea and 
Amen. 

Instead, therefore, of maintaining or supposing 
that the Christian is to get on by fighting out his 
own cause, and furnishing in that manner his own 
armor, we see that he can no way put on the whole 
armor of God except by that kind of exercise that 
enables him to prove it and wear it. The process 
of victory is an arming process even under faith, 
and no one ever gets fully armed who has not car- 
ried victories of faith. 

Let us turn our attention now to some of the 
methods in which our past successes prepare us for 
other and greater. 

First of all, we observe that the very contest 
waged will itself, taken as an exercise, strengthen 
the mind and invigorate the sense of holy principle. 
"Next it will impart new courage, and courage is the 
soul of power. To know that we have triumphed 
imparts a confidence of triumph. It is even doubt- 
ful whether a Themistocles, a Cyrus, or a Napoleon, 
defeated at some early period in his history, would 
not have been fatally crushed and disempowered. 
Victory began with these men, and victory held them 
up. So it is with the Christian. Spiritual success 
gives him spiritual courage, and the want of it crip- 
ples him. Suppose he is afflicted with misgivings 
in regard to his capacity for some great work of duty. 
Some trial of his faith and capacity in a narrower 
sphere where he succeeds will set him on, displacing 
every anxiety. 



110 OUR BEST WEAPONS 

At the same time, what encourages him will dis- 
courage all the obstacles and enemies in his way. 
All enemies of God and truth tremble when they 
have to face a man who has proved his mettle in 
the exercise of Christian power. Felix trembled 
probably as much because Paul was a man of re- 
ported energy and had the visible tone of it in his 
action as because of the truths he told him. Wher- 
ever a Wesley or a Whitfield went, the sound of 
their power went before them, and their hearers 
were half subdued in anticipation. So universally, 
if a Christian is known to have exerted a great power 
and influence over mankind, or to have been the suc- 
cessful champion of any great cause, men expect to 
be moved and impressed by him; opposition is in- 
timidated in advance, and all the forces of resistance 
are weakened. External foes and obstacles make 
but a feeble resistance to one who comes with the 
trophies of victory. His former successes are all so 
many weapons, and the strength of hostility is pal- 
sied by the sight of them. 

The same is true also in regard to the internal 
enemies of the Christian. If, for example, he is 
afilicted with doubts of a sceptical nature, to have 
slain one doubt in a fair and manly combat is to 
get a weapon against all the others. They will slink 
away into their secret recesses, and will hardly dare 
to whisper their suggestions. In like manner, to 
have gone through a period of mental darkness and 
despair and come into the light again is to have got- 
ten an advantage over all the vapors and morbid 
humors of grim depression. Where Giant Despair 



GOTTEN BY CONQUEST HI 

is slain, and the hand that before conld only sling 
a pebble is seen grasping his sword, all the giants of 
the fancy are ready to flee or surrender at once. 
So if you will vanquish many foolish and hurtful 
lusts, you need thoroughly kill but one and the oth- 
ers will offer but a tame resistance. If you have a 
jealous temper, get the mastery of that, and all the 
bitter passions will skulk and disappear, anticipating 
their doom. If you dread the opinion of mankind, 
face it down in but one clear point of duty, and you 
will have your deliverance. If you are haunted by 
the love of gain, wrench away the cords of but one 
bad appetite, tasting thus the sweets of liberty, and 
you may bind your foe at pleasure. Bridle your 
tongue, and then you may turn about your whole 
body. God's design is to give you chances of vic- 
tory, and then by every victory gained to put an- 
other sword of victory in your hands. 

Let us now note some of the practical lessons in- 
cluded in this great principle. Observe the very 
great importance to a Christian of making first vic- 
tories. Everything depends upon it. If they are 
not made the life will very certainly be a failiire. 
If they are it hardly can be. 

How often do we hear it said that it is a very 
easy thing to begin a right life, but to carry it on 
and maintain it to the end is more difficult. That 
depends entirely on what we mean by a beginning; 
for it is quite as true that when a beginning is once 
really made in some conscious and determinate vic- 
tory, the course from that time onward is compar- 
atively clear. Just here, accordingly, is the diffi- 



112 OUR BEST WEAPONS 

culty: to make such a beginning — such a beginning, 
that is, as establishes the sense of God's union to the 
soul and awakens in it the confidence of victory. 
Make it, then, a first point to gain some kind of 
triumph or success. E'othing is more clear than 
that you will be vanquished everywhere if you do 
not begin to vanquish somewhere. The successful 
Christian is one who, at some time, began to be suc- 
cessful. He set himself upon a doubt or an envious 
temper, mortified some passion, mastered some ap- 
petite or frivolous propensity, prevailed in some 
supplication, carried some good work against the op- 
posing force of obstacles or enemies. Thus he be- 
gan to taste of success, and success gave him cour- 
age, and so he went on till he became a powerful 
Christian soldier. On the other hand, no man ever 
succeeds whose beginnings are all failures. The 
statement is almost too simple to be made with so- 
briety. And yet there are multitudes who begin 
with a slack application, allowing everything to go 
against them, and expecting somehow that their 
tide will turn and that finally they will be doing bet- 
ter. But the expectation never overtakes the fact. 
And so the whole battle, if such it can be called, is 
defeat even to the end. 

In order to make sure of gaining something or 
carrying some good point, it will probably be wise 
or even a matter of necessity to single out or skil- 
fully select, as a good general always will, your 
point of attack, such a point as you can carry with 
most certainty and to the best advantage. A gen- 
eral victory is won by approaches and stages. Se- 



GOTTEN BY CONQUEST 113 

lect, then, particular sins or infirmities to be mas- 
tered, particular habits to be broken down, a doubt, 
a point of self-indulgence or self -pleasing, fastidious- 
ness, a bad association, some subtle weakness of 
pride or ambition that needs to be chastened, some 
want of faith that needs to be supplied, some work 
not undertaken or some duty not done which presses 
you and becomes a barricade across your path. The 
difficulty with most Christians is that they endeavor 
to gain a general victory, and no victory in particu- 
lar. They expect to overthrow everything, and 
really overthrow nothing. Hence the wisdom, es- 
pecially at first, of singling out an enemy or point 
of assault, and beginning the onset where triumph is 
possible. Undertake at one time only what you may 
hope to carry, and never plan a defeat. And if you 
will know where to begin or what to undertake first, 
it is a good rule in general to fall upon that which 
presses you most. Whatever most specially annoys 
and harasses you, any sin that you would call a be- 
setting sin, is that which hangs out a challenge and 
elects itself to be defeated by its forwardness. Do 
not undertake remote points or scale theoretical 
summits of perfection before you have scaled prac- 
tical barriers close at hand. Fighting battles in 
fields afar off is a matter of the fancy and not of 
fact, and the execution done will not be greater than 
the courage required. 'No soldier fights with spirit 
an enemy that does not press upon him. And hence, 
for an additional reason, you are to single out for 
the engagement just that enemy that is pressing you 
most and most annoys you. Probably God lets him 



114 OUR BEST WEAPONS 

come upon you first just because he is weakest; for, 
though he may have a giant look, there is probably 
some spot in his forehead where a mere pebble fitly 
slung will break through. Vanquish this enemy, 
then take his sword as he falls, and with that en- 
gage the next challenger that comes, who will cer- 
tainly find you a much sturdier adversary than you 
were before. 

Let me not be misunderstood when I recommend 
this dealing with single adversaries. It will some- 
times be observed that a skilful leader gains the 
entire campaign by a simple means, that only brings 
him into a position to cut up the enemy in detail 
without hazard. So also the Christian may some- 
times gain a position of faith or a holy standing with 
God so high and sovereign that every sort of adver- 
sary is virtually discomfited in advance. And for 
the same reason there are cases, it may be imagined, 
where the Christian will do best to spend some time 
in gaining position; for a good part of the enemies 
we have to meet will quit the field at once as soon 
as they see that we have got into the point that com- 
mands it. But the analogy referred to here will not 
hold without qualification. The Christian does not 
merely march when he gets into position with God. 
He has in some sense to conquer that position. And 
commonly it will be found when he sets himseK to 
the attainment of an advanced standing in his piety 
that some single obstacle more than all things else 
forces him back. He must make some sacrifice, be 
reconciled to some enemy, revise some great pur- 
pose, reconstruct some cherished plan of life, con- 



GOTTEN BY CONQUEST 115 

quer some appetite or passion, dislodge the world in 
some fortress it holds in his heart. He will spring 
accordingly into the position he seeks the moment 
he carries that single point, whatever it be. But 
that requires a great struggle, just because it is the 
evil that besets him. 'No qualification, therefore, is 
needed in the advice that we single out our ad- 
versary, unless it be that we do it always because 
he stands a chief obstacle between us and God, and 
do it that we may come into God more perfectly. 
Our object, in other words, should never be just to 
carry that one point but to carry a state of more 
complete unity with God. The advantage of first 
victories is always that they bring us into martial 
position, where we hold the summits of the field and 
have it in complete command. 

I do not mean to say that every Christian can do 
everything or that any Christian can do anything 
which does not belong to him. I only say that there 
is given to every disciple, if he can find it, something 
worthy of him, something which properly belongs to 
him, and which being done by him fills out a life 
that is in the highest sense a successful life. Nor 
is anything more simple. Let him do the thing 
nearest at hand, conquer his first enemy, and go on 
as God will help him to conquer all enemies and 
they will all be conquered. There is commonly no 
want of success, no failure, no defeat, the cause of 
which is not perfectly manifest. It is because you 
go after your fancy and do not grapple with fact, 
because you want to do things a great way off, such 
as stir your ambition and make you what you were 



116 OUR BEST WEAPONS 

not made to be. Or it is because you wait to see 
if God or accident will not give you success, before 
you really commence the warfare; expecting mighty 
weapons to come and put themselves in your hands. 
E"o, you must arise and take them. You must get 
your weapons by the fall of your enemies, and it 
may be that your first enemies are such as it does 
not compliment you at all to recognize or acknowl- 
edge. A mean, low envy, a base appetite, a false 
shame of ignorance or poverty, a conceit of being 
something you are not and were never made to be, 
impatience with your lot, and a determination to 
break out of it before God lets you out. Begin at 
your point whatever it be, and have it as a good 
point of beginning. If it is want, suffering, igno- 
rance, depression, conquer a victory that belongs to 
suffering, want, ignorance, depression. Make ad- 
versity bloom in holy patience and see what honors 
come upon it, what purity and strength it yields. 
Understand also, everyone, that success comes by 
having a beginning, and never in the gross and total 
sum at first. If you are to have power over your 
whole body, have it first over your tongue or any 
member that is most unruly. If you would have 
power over your fellowmen, begin to have it with 
a few that come within your sphere. If you would 
impress nations or turn about cities, get impression 
first where you can, and so get the power. If you 
would prevail with God for mankind, let him teach 
you in the small and think it enough that you are 
able to prevail more as you get more faith. If you 
are to conquer and crush all your internal enemies 



GOTTEN BY CONQUEST 117 

and produce a character of holy strength and beauty, 
you must crush some one of these enemies and bring 
him under. There is no Christian so weak that he 
may not in this way become strong. I care not 
what your condition may be, what your calling, what 
your capacity, God gives it to you to be successful 
and to know that you are. It will be such success 
as belongs to you, but it will be real and great suc- 
cess, such as gladdens your life, fills you with cour- 
age, and even makes you confess that you want no 
other kind or sphere of life than just the kind and 
sphere he gives you. God has not enlisted us for 
defeat. 

O, thou decayed and dull disciple, thou that hast 
consciously no power whether with God or man, 
thou that hast conquered nothing, made no progress, 
but hast only gone down by stages of defeat and loss, 
and darest claim scarcely more than a name to live, 
most sad and sorrowful is the figure thou makest as 
a soldier! And still more sad when thou hearest 
the promise of the leader to him that overcometh. 
If this overcoming is to be finished, when shall it 
begin? Thus far you reveal no token of victory 
even to yourself. And how small is the probability 
that a soul demoralized by long defeat will gather 
itself up to a course more triumphant. Still smaller 
is the probability if you have learned to believe that 
success is not granted to all. Until that belief is 
forever removed and the blame of your failure ac- 
cepted in deep sorrow before God, there is no hope 
that you will ever return to an earnest and true be- 
ginning of that life which has the promise of salva- 



118 OUR BEST WEAPONS 

tion. Meantime this one thing is clear, that you 
will never be driven into God's kingdom to be shel- 
tered there from the loss and ignominy of a defeated 
life. Salvation is success and nothing else — the go- 
ing on to perfection, to conquest of all enemies, the 
full establishment and complete revelation of God 
in the soul. As certainly, therefore, as you succeed, 
you can be saved. 

I cannot close without addressing myself to a 
large class of persons not recognized by others or 
by themselves as being Christians. They are such 
as look on the Christian life with favor and desire, 
who have many serious hours, who sometimes pray 
and have many struggles with themselves, wishing 
it were possible to find some way of making a veri- 
table and well-certified beginning of the Christian 
life. Then they would have confidence, and would 
take their ground firmly and openly. But they fear 
to put themselves forward even by an inch beyond 
their present position, lest, after all, they may not 
be able to get on, and to fail would be mortifying 
and disastrous. To all such I would say, believe in 
success. God permits you to believe in it, calls you 
to believe in it. God is pledged to give you success. 
You cannot make a failure if you trust him. Hold 
fast no longer as if there were some lion in your 
way that will slay you. Be the lion yourself. Just 
let yourself advance, and you will. Break out into 
duty and you will just as certainly break out into a 
song. Dare to pray, dare to speak, dare to attack 
your sins, and the strongest first if it most presses 
you. You will get swords in this manner faster 



GOTTEN BY CONQUEST 119 

than you know how to use them. Set your busmess 
on a Christian footing. Be reconciled to your 
enemy. Confess your wrong, and repair it if you 
are conscious of any. Offer up your whole life in 
holy trust to God. Profess the name of Christ. 
Mark out a course life-long, and begin it. Do this, 
and the sun might just as well be afraid to rise lest 
he should not be able to hold on for the day. Come, 
now, here is the sword you wait for. You can even 
touch it with your fingers. Take it, take it and it is 
yours. And then, success and victory to the end! 
All your misgivings will vanish. Courage from 
God will settle on you, progress attend you, and as 
God is faithful the crown is yours. 



VI 

A WEEK-DAY SEEMO]^ TO THE BUSI- 
]!^ESS ME]Sr OF HAETFOED * 

And when the ship was caught, and could not bear up 
into the wind, we let her drive. — Acts xxvii. 15. 

They submitted, in other words, to the tempest 
when they could not face it, and did it as an act of 
sound discretion. Probably their ship was not quite 
as able to battle with storms and hold her course 
against them as some of the sturdier sea-going ves- 
sels of our day, but they put her faithfully and brave- 
ly to it as long as they could with safety, then as delib- 
erately and bravely they gave her to the wind and let 
her drive. Had they undertaken to fight the battle 
through, holding up against the fury of the tempest, 
their little craft would most certainly have foundered 
or been driven under never to rise. By submitting 
to the tempest just when they must, they proved their 
seamanship and escaped with their lives. 

Just so it is in other kinds of storms. When their 
fury is irresistible, it is no part of wisdom to resist. 
A dexterous and timely submission is the only way 
left of getting the mastery. This, in fact, is the great 

* Preached in Hartford, October 31, 1857, at the height of the 
financial crisis of that year, and published in the supplement to the 
Hartford Courant. 

120 



A WEEK-DAY SERMON 121 

power of man, namely, a power of address by which 
he manages, and, as it were, turns about forces great- 
er than his own. When he adjusts a sail he takes the 
winds into his service to work for him and drag his 
heavy bulks across wide seas and oceans. And when 
they become riotous or uncontrollable, finding good 
sea room for it, he offers himself to their fury in the 
same calculating way till their breath is spent, con- 
senting to lose ground for safety's sake, and in that 
manner getting the voyage out of them in despite of 
themselves. And this timely submission is just as 
much a part of his power and manly sovereignty as 
the more direct methods of control, by which he takes 
into service forces that consent to serve him. Indeed 
it is no small part of the grandeur of man that he can 
plan out and execute enterprises that succeed by tak- 
ing in losses and partial defeats, and adjusting com- 
binations of contrary force so as to throw a balance 
on his side. A squirrel, lifting his little bush of tail 
on a chip, may well enough sail to the opposite side 
of a river when the wind is in that direction. But a 
man will do it when the wind is against him, and make 
the wind carry him over besides. First he submits 
to be carried a little up, then a little down, and the 
next you see is that by submission he is at exactly 
the point where he wanted to be and away from which 
the wind was determined to keep him. And the 
same is true, only in a little different sense, when he 
submits himself at sea to the driving of a hurricane 
he cannot manage at all. Taken in the largest view, 
it is his way of getting the voyage and making the 
winds give it to him. And he is only a more truly 



122 A WEEK-DAY SERMON 

magisterial creature in his triumph, that he is able 
to carry his points by taking in such hurricanes of 
force to be mastered. His submissions therefore 
cost him no mortification, for they are in fact the 
highest points of mastership in his management. 

When the Russians fell away before the victorious 
army of E'apoleon, it cost them doubtless a degree of 
national mortification, because it was to human force 
they yielded ; but in the fires they kindled and the dev- 
astations they made before him, preparing in that de- 
liberate manner his inevitable destruction, it is impos- 
sible not to admire the sublimity of their retirement 
before the storm, and even feel that they have outgen- 
eralled him gloriously enough to put the mortification 
over on the other side. Much less reason therefore 
is there to be detained by any feeling of pride, when 
it is the powers of nature and providence or the neces- 
sary laws of society and trade that require a change 
of tactics, and compel us for the time to give way 
before combinations that are irresistible. It is even 
a weakness then to be jealous of weakness. None but 
a very foolish kind of animal fights a train of cars, 
refusing to get out of the way. As little wisdom is 
there often in fighting a disease. The true principle 
is to stand out, refusing to be sick till it is plain that 
we must, then cease from labor, draw off from expos- 
ure, rest, sleep, medicate and wait till the inward 
storm of the fever is spent. And where the disease 
will certainly come, it may even be the point of true 
wisdom to submit and take it in advance ; as for ex- 
ample in that brave practice of inoculation which 
once prevailed, where the well man took the virus of 



TO BUSINESS MEN 123 

the malady and went off to the pest-house to let it try 
what it could do with him. 

In these and all such examples we see a great 
principle verified, viz., that a good part of our true 
wisdom and dignity consists in a dexterous and timely 
submission to evils we cannot resist; that when the 
ship is caught and cannot bear up into the wind, 
there is no use in trying to make her do the impossi- 
ble ; let her take the storm and drive before it. 

I hardly need say that I offer this principle as one 
that has a comfortable and true application to our 
times. There has never fallen upon the troubled wa- 
ters of our commerce and trade a storm so devastat- 
ing and terrible as that which is now upon us. The 
stanchest and heaviest ships, ballasted with capital 
and bolted with prudence and sheathed in old reputa- 
tion, have scarcely been more able to bear up than the 
slenderest and lightest skiffs of credit. The storm 
broke suddenly upon us unnotified, save as the bird 
that is always cawing a sign of ill weather is certain 
sometimes to be right. In a single month it has bro- 
ken down all confidence and credit a-nd set us founder- 
ing in a sea of general bankruptcy. The best con- 
ducted business is scarcely more secure than the worst. 
Even capital itself cannot pay a debt and — what is 
hardest of all and worthy of the deepest, most re- 
spectful sympathy — men who have valued more than 
money their repute of honor and faith and infallible 
capacity are brought down at the very height of 
their supposed prosperity, to miss their times and be 
disallowed in the market and posted in the journals 
with the common herd of bankruptcy. There has 



124 A WEEK-DAY SERMON 

never been a time probably since the world began, 
when real soundness and merit of any kind signified 
so little. 

And now at last a change has come. We tried to 
bear up into the wind as long as any show of capacity 
for it was left us, till finally capital itself, in all of 
those great institutions of banking by which it is most 
especially represented, has submitted to the dread 
necessity and consented as a last hope to be driven 
with the storm and by it, till its fury is spent. In one 
view therefore we are all drifting now down the cur- 
rent together, hoping with a little hope and waiting 
to know whether we are to be stranded on the lee- 
shore of irrecoverable bankruptcy or not. It is well, 
so far, that we have finally bowed to the fact that we 
could not resist, and consented as the only chance of 
victory to bide our time ; for this we have seen is 
often the only true seamanship. 

Meantime it is a proper subject of congratulation 
that our moneyed institutions in Hartford, and espe- 
cially our merchants, have thus far stood the revul- 
sion so firmly. What is yet to come cannot now be 
assumed, but I think it may be said with confidence 
that hitherto there have been proportionately fewer 
suspensions in the large trading-houses of Hartford 
than in any other place in the country. And there is 
the greater reason for congratulation in this matter 
that it augurs well for our future; when if we had 
yielded early and been universally prostrated it would 
have been a most fatal blow to us. Hartford is no 
natural centre for a heavy business of any kind. 
!N^othing but the unwonted energy and capacity of our 



TO BUSINESS MEN 125 

business men has drawn to it so many investments of 
capital and so large an amount of trade. Our banks 
and companies of insurance have a name of confidence 
in every part of our great country, and our merchants, 
composing a corps second in capacity to those of no 
other small city of the v^orld, have built up an almost 
national trade at this naturally uncommercial and 
otherwise undistinguished locality, doing it by noth- 
ing but the pure force of energy and character they 
have contributed. In the creative processes of me- 
chanical industry, we have also several establishments 
that are beginning to have a national reputation. 
These latter belong as naturally here perhaps as any- 
where, and contribute much to the prosperity of our 
city. But the moneyed and trading operations, by 
which we are so widely known in the world of busi- 
ness, are creations upheld by nothing but our capacity 
and the solid integrity of our character. They can- 
not live an hour beyond the force that impels them 
and the reputation that sustains them. And for just 
this reason it is even a special subject of thanksgiv- 
ing to God that we have lost nothing, but have rather 
gained thus far by the evidences of strength and sta- 
bility we have been able to show. And I see in the 
fact new ground of confidence that Hartford may go 
on to increase indefinitely in just the manner it has 
done. There is no such narrow limit to the business 
that may be done here and the wealth that may be ac- 
cumulated, as many judging by the natural facilities 
of our location might suppose. The greatest, surest, 
facility of trade after all is in competent and faithful 
men. Every such man grows to be a navigable river, 



126 A WEEK-DAY SERMON 

a railroad, a new artery of communication, a new port 
of entry, and the centre thus created men of trade will 
somehow visit from all remotest parts, drawn to it 
by a kind of feeling that they have a natural connec- 
tion with it. They love to be connected with a place 
where things are rationally and vigorously done. 

But it is important if these hopes are to be realized, 
whether more or fewer may be finally compelled to 
yield, that we should trim ourselves rightly to the 
storm till it is past. And partly for this end, partly 
also for the sake of a higher and nobler benefit, I will 
now suggest a few things which most especially claim 
your attention. 

1. Give place, if you have yielded to the storm, to 
no false mortification. Mortification is a wonder- 
fully weakening influence. It takes away a great 
part of a man's capacity. It is therefore a point of 
true manhood never to suffer it where there is no just 
reason, because of some imagined loss of standing in 
the view of others. The true magnanimity is to make 
others respect you when you know that you have a 
right to it. Doubtless it would have been very agree- 
able to you to have stood up to the storm and driven 
your bark triumphantly through; I hope it may be 
permitted you. But if you are overtaken by these un- 
wonted and wholly extraordinary combinations of dis- 
aster, you have scarcely more reason to be mortified, 
whatever the effect may be or you may imagine it to 
be on your repute with others, than if you had been 
overtaken by an earthquake. 'No human wisdom, 
nothing but the most unmanly caution could have put 
you in a condition of safety. This is as well known 



TO BUSINESS MEN 127 

to others as to yourselves. Give way then to no com- 
mercial prudery, as if you had fallen somewhat, in 
case you are compelled to yield. 'Now is the time to 
rise and tower more vigorously than ever. Dare to 
respect yourself only the more that you show yourself 
a man in the day of your disaster. 

2. Have little to do with mere regrets, contriving 
how you would have avoided many things if you had 
done differently here or there. These regrets also 
weaken and distract the mind and shorten down its 
capacity. It is very true doubtless that you would 
have done better if you had done otherwise in many 
things ; but how could you know it ? Did you not use 
the best judgment you had? And who that is mortal 
was ever able to grasp the future so as not to see, after 
the facts transpired, how he could have so ordered 
his plans as to avoid this and that disaster? Thus if 
our ship, in the text, had not gone to sea till after the 
storm was over^ it would doubtless have had a smooth 
time of it. Probably there was never a shipwreck 
that might not somehow have been avoided, if some- 
thing had been ordered differently. If we had not 
gone to ride we should not have been thrown ; if we 
had put off taking the cars till to-morrow we should 
not have been dashed on the rocks to-day. If we had 
gone to sea we should not have been overtaken by the 
earthquake. If we had stayed on the land we should 
not have been shipwrecked in the storm. All such re- 
grets are unpractical and even foolish. Enough that 
you did what appeared to be the best thing possible, 
and that if it was not really the best as you now see, 
it was yet as good as you or any other probably could 



128 A WEEK-DAY SERMON 

devise. Stand up therefore to your plan, and take 
the brunt of it with a stout heart. Your judgment is 
never so really dishonored as when you torture it with 
unreasonable regrets and fall to lamenting it or throw- 
ing idle blame upon it. 

3. See to it that, in finally yielding to the storm 
if yield you must, you let go in no manner of despair 
or panic. Yield because you must, and deliberately 
as a matter of counsel ; and then sail down the storm 
in counsel, just as before you endeavored to sail up. 
Choose your time and manner skilfully, and when you 
go about stand by the helm, ^o vessel can live for 
any length of time that is wholly given up or aban- 
doned to the storm. It must be steered away before 
it and kept to its course as carefully and skilfully as 
if it were still making its point of destination. ]^ow 
in fact is the time for a talented and brave seaman- 
ship. Just so to steer a suspended and protested busi- 
ness as to bring it out safe, or to make it yield most 
for the creditors when it can no longer yield anything 
for itself, requires great skill, firmness, pertinacity 
and a truly heroic fidelity. It is no time therefore 
now for a cessation of counsel or a spiritless surrender 
of your capacity. All the faculty you have is wanted 
and that in its best and bravest order; for now 
your seamanship is to be tested. Set yourself to it 
therefore, if you must fall away before the storm, to 
keep your shattered craft in the best trim possible. 
Watch for the changes, look out for the headlands, and 
miss no opportunity to run in where a possible shelter 
opens. Gather in thus all that is left you, turning 
everything to the best account; so that when the 



TO BUSINESS MEN 129 

trial is over you can feel that you have, at least, stood 
by your cause and omitted nothing which was possible 
to be done. 

4. Do not be too much intent, just now, on finding 
where to put the blame of this great catastrophe, or 
too confident of any plan by which similar revulsions 
may be avoided. Doubtless something may be said of 
paper money, something of overtrading, something of 
railroads, and something too that carries a semblance 
of reason ; but if every one of these particular causes 
of mischief had been avoided or hereafter should be, 
it would make little difference save in requiring the 
disaster to come in some different way, for come it 
would. The real fact is that these money panics and 
storms of the market are inevitable and must come, 
if not in one shape then in another. They come by a 
law as truly as the seasons do, only coming of tener and 
with greater violence in new countries, where impulse 
is greater and the modes of operation are less ham- 
pered by previously settled forms and terms of prece- 
dent. There will be credit in some form where 
there is life^ and there never can be a limit to it save 
as one is set by the conditions of possible safety. 
Pressing on therefore upon this limit, by all the im- 
pulse or impetus there is in the general motion, we 
can never stop at the limit save as we occasionally 
break over it ; for we never know what is safe except 
by trying the unsafe. This therefore in a young 
nation we must do every short generation in trade, 
that is, every twenty or twenty-five years. In older 
nations it will be done less frequently, and generally 
in a degree less violent. The better way therefore is 



130 A WEEK-DAY SERMON 

to expend as little force as possible in denunciation or 
fault-finding; for, if we could tell exactly how the 
mischief came and show exactly how it could have 
been averted, it would only have come in another 
shape and one probably quite as unwelcome. God 
made the sea^ not for still weather or to be skimmed 
by breezes blowing according to order, but for storms 
and all rough weather ; that it might be a field for the 
training of courage and the gaining of voyages by con- 
quest. And so it is in this great sea of trade. There 
is no rougher and more perilous element, and the pur- 
pose of it is to harden firmness, and train the mer- 
chants and bankers who embark on it to a genuine 
vigor and a wise and victorious seamanship. Instead 
therefore of being too much occupied in complaints 
and censorious accusations, it will be much better to 
take your lesson manfully and get your capacity stif- 
fened by a wiser counsel and a more practised and 
storm-beaten courage. 

5. When you are endeavoring to help and take care 
of yourself, do it in a manner of forbearance and 
mutual accommodation to others. If all these ma- 
tured or shortly maturing obligations could get a 
year to stop for them, they would be ready without 
difficulty when it started and bring in their pay- 
ments clear of any constraint or hardship. But 
while that is impossible, let it be remembered 
that a consent to accommodations running round 
the circle as nearly as may be is the only escape 
from a condition of universal distress. Happily 
such accommodations are wanted by all, and by 
one about as much as by another. There is also 



TO BUSINESS MEN 131 

the greater reason for such mutual consideration, 
that this terrible day of calamity has burst on the 
world of trade as earthquakes do on cities and prov- 
inces, as the messenger of Providence, and was scarce- 
ly more to be anticipated or averted by man. Be- 
sides, there is a yet stronger necessity of forbearance 
and mutual help incumbent on you, as the business 
men managing the business capital of a small city. 
You cannot here afford to worry and weaken each oth- 
er. You are not too strong when you stand together, 
and this must be your strength. You may rival 
each other in trade as actively as you please. Nev- 
ertheless, in yet another view, you have a most pro- 
found interest in the success of every trade and mon- 
eyed institution of the city; for a great part of your 
own reputation stands in the repute of all. The very 
city, being small as it is, wants to be a name of sound- 
ness, trustworthiness and all rational prosperity. 
What is wanted is that every bank, every house of 
trade and insurance, should get strength and firmness 
from the repute of every other. And the greater the 
number therefore of successful operators you can 
rally here, and the more closely locked together you 
can show them to be in terms of amity and mutual 
good understanding, the better fulfilled are the neces- 
sary conditions of success to you all. For, all togeth- 
er, you will give a name in distant places to the city 
itself, and that again will give you back a name still 
further advanced and fortified. Have it then as a 
principle that every good and true man or institution 
shall, if possible, be held up by every other. If you 
have any bogus institution, any stock-gambling, 



132 A WEEK-DAY SERMON 

note-shaving concern, any cut-throat operator going 
after gain in the instinct of prey, any fast man 
overliving his means and sustaining show by credit, 
no matter how much these and such like are let 
alone, isolated, conspired against, trampled — these 
you can afford to spare. It is even a duty that 
you owe to yourselves and your credit, as a body 
of trade, that they be as little encouraged and helped 
by as few allowances as possible. They cannot 
die too soon. But whatever house or institution 
has real merit should, if possible, be upheld and not 
allowed to fall. 'No jealousy or cabal should be suf- 
fered to come in their way, no conspiracy or preju- 
dice or ill will or envy to cripple them. That mag- 
nanimity which looks to the common good and sets 
you firmly together is the true wisdom. 

I cannot close without drawing your attention to 
the great fraternity of trouble in which you find your- 
selves, each one, a member. Trade is a great machine 
or mill, into which all that will any way be en- 
gaged are obliged to come and take their places, and 
then, when the mill breaks down or flies in pieces, 
they must take their chance one and all of being 
crushed. How many of the men or institutions that 
are now suffering are in no way to blame for it ! They 
have done their business well and rightly. They have 
come into this distress by no fault of their own. But 
the coil of the great machine or mill is round them, 
and the disasters created by others come upon them 
as truly as if made by themselves. The credit system 
is a whole and they are in it and must groan with it. 
A vast organic unity includes the innocent and the 



TO BUSINESS MEN 133 

guilty together, and the breaking down of all credit by 
frauds, bad stocks, worthless expenditures, falls upon 
them as heavily and remorselessly as if they were in 
the wrong themselves. And the desolation reaches 
far, extending to how many thousands of the indus- 
trious poor, who are thrown even out of their bread 
and set upon the prospect of a cold winter without any 
means at hand of shielding their families from dis- 
tress. These after all are the real sufferers and, as 
they suffer with you and for you, taking the dregs of 
that sorrow which your disorders have created, they 
will rightly demand your sympathy and your most 
fraternal consideration. When such loads are upon 
you it is asking much of you, I know, to require that 
you increase your burdens. But the strongest neces- 
sity is that of mercy and, as you look for deliverance 
yourselves, God requires you to look after these, on 
whom after all the real distress of your troubles 
must fall. 

Meantime, seeing how the whole organization of 
business and trade is one, compelling the most hon- 
est and careful and even the laboring poor to suf- 
fer the woes that have come as penalties of fraud, 
overtrading, speculation and all wild expenditure, 
how clear is it that the world of business needs 
to be qualified and kept safe by the moderating in- 
fluences of religion ! Go to the bottom of these woes 
of the market and they are all moral. They repre- 
sent the sins of trade, the want of sobriety, the wild 
extravagance, the reckless irresponsibility, the tre- 
mendous plottings of real fraud, all going on for many 
years and rolling up a score of retribution, finally to 



134 A WEEK-DAY SERMON 

burst on us and claim us for chastisement. In all 
which you are to see, as God helps you, that as your 
own fortunes are bound up with the fortunes of all 
wickedness and wildness, so you are to extend your 
obligations back to that which travels down to you, 
and become the minister of God's truth and religion 
to your times. If, as a people, you have in your own 
city any special and particular helps to success and 
prosperity, they are such as come of the proportion- 
ateness, the responsibility, the sobriety and honesty 
of your character as grounded in the influences of re- 
ligion. These are to be your security hereafter ; and 
if ever these panics and woes of trade are to be finally 
averted in our great country it will be in the fact that 
religion, extended by your care and by that of all good 
men in the land, has become its stability. There 
is more of security and order in that one simple 
word of the Lord Jesus : " Seek ye first the kingdom 
of God and His righteousness, and all these things 
shall be added unto you," than there is in all legal 
safeguards. Here is the proportion of the mental 
sanity, and that is the sanity of the market. Take 
it, live in it and by it, propagate the spirit of it, 
knowing that by this alone can the true balance of 
reason and the security of commercial order be final- 
ly established. 



YII 
PEOSPEKITY OUE DUTY* 

This same Hezekiah also stopped the upper water-course 
of Grihon, and brought it straight down to the west side 
of the city of David. And Hezekiah prospered in all his 
works." — Chronicles xxxii. 30. 

Any community or city will prosper that will do 
its duty. Having the prudence necessary to a right 
husbandry of its resources, the industry to improve 
its advantages and the spirit to seize on whatever 
opportunities are placed within its reach, the in- 
crease of substance and of numbers is a necessary 
consequence. It may not always come by damming 
water-courses and opening sluices or canals to bring 
in supplies of water. There are other sluices of 
prosperity besides water-sluices, and a wise people 
will make their election. 

I ought therefore to say, first of all, that I have 
no design to offer a discourse this evening on the 
scheme just proposed for advancing the growth of 
our city. I have cited the former clause of my text 
only as an introduction to the latter and more gen- 
eral clause, that which sets forth the prosperity of 
a good ruler's works. It is not for me to say that 

* Preached in the North Church, Hartford, Sunday evening, Jan- 
uary 31, 1847. 

i35 



136 PROSPERITY OUR DUTY 

tlie scheme just proposed has any solid merits to 
commend it to confidence. And if I were sure that 
it had, it is not my office to advocate works of public 
improvement, nor to meddle in any respect with 
schemes which are purely secular and belong only 
to the province of business men. I shall only speak 
of prosperity in general, and of the moral causes and 
consequences connected with it. Could I realize all 
that I wish, it would be to set you in the best pos- 
sible attitude for the exercise of your own wisdom 
and the prompt fulfilment of any responsibilities, 
that now or at any future time may be laid upon 
you; to invigorate confidence, to consolidate public 
spirit, and prepare you to all works of sacrifice and 
industry that may be needed to sustain your growth 
or advance your prosperity. Then whatever you 
may undertake or decline you will undertake or de- 
cline for yourselves; it will only be more sure that 
you will not be false to any just enterprise or call 
of duty that comes before you. It will not be amiss 
for you to notice the fact that revelation records it 
as one of the works of a good ruler's administration 
that he raised a dam at Gihon and brought down the 
water to Jerusalem; also that he added prosperity 
to his realm by these and other like enterprises. 
"Nor will it be amiss that the future generations 
should record the like of you, connected with a like 
result. But the probability of any such result rests 
wholly with you.* 

Most of you may be accustomed to look at this 

♦ This sermon was, however, a potent and immediate factor in 
the introduction of a water supply into the city of Hartford. 



PROSPERITY OUR DUTY 137 

question of public prosperity as one that has a purely 
secular interest. Contrary to this, I regard it as a 
question that involves, in all coming time, the dear- 
est interests of character and religion. For, on the 
one hand, it will be found that a state of prosperity 
is itself one of the truest evidences of character and 
public virtue, — a reward and honor which God de- 
lights to bestow upon an upright people; and on 
the other, it will be found that a want of prosperity, 
followed by decline and decay, discourages every- 
thing good and works a moral prostration every way 
correspondent. And it is in this view that every 
Christian, and especially every Christian minister, 
dreads the possibility of decline. For, while others 
are occupied chiefly with the mere outward loss, he 
is compelled to anticipate another kind of mischief 
which, to him, is far more afflictive and depressing. 

I do not know that we have any such result to 
fear. I cannot ascertain that we have suffered or 
begun to suffer any real diminution of numbers or 
of resources. But the opening of new avenues of 
trade and travel on every side of us has compelled 
the business of our city to change its form. Some 
kinds of trade have been partially destroyed, but 
others have been and are being created. And it is 
natural while these changes are going on that we 
should all suffer a degree of anxiety. Some may be 
unduly anxious. Others too may be over-confident. 
This at least is certain, that we have come now to a 
great and final crisis. The causes that are going to 
affect the interests of our city as a place of business 
in all future time are now displayed and coming 



138 PROSPERITY OUR DUTY 

into action. Hereafter no great change is to be an- 
ticipated. It is not as when we lost our West India 
commerce. And now it is to be decided within the 
next five or ten years whether we are to go on main- 
taining our growth and numbers, or to sink into de- 
cline. Up to this time our city has maintained an 
even, healthy and generally constant growth from 
the very first day of the settlement. The river has 
been its life. 'Now at last there are opening rivers 
of trade and motion above us and back of us on 
every side, and it is very soon to be seen whether 
we can turn the resources left us in such a way as 
to escape injury. If we can, if we prove ourselves 
equal to the crisis that has now come, our foundation 
is sure for all future time; we shall go on to in- 
crease in wealth and numbers indefinitely, though 
perhaps not rapidly. This it becomes every man of 
us to understand. Be it also remembered that the 
crisis we have reached is one that concerns not our 
business only and our wealth, but quite as truly all 
the higher interests of character and religion. 

We are often required as ministers of truth to 
speak of the dangers of prosperity. Prosperity has 
its dangers. They are many and great. You can- 
not too often be apprised of them, or by any pos- 
sible warnings be made to watch too carefully 
against them. But there is yet another kind of dan- 
ger, quite as real and quite as hard to conquer, viz., 
the danger that springs from wasting and decline. 
And if such wasting or decline is caused by a man's 
own fault, as by a want of industry or attention to 
business, by a loose economy, by a self-indulgent or 



PROSPERITY OUR DUTY 139 

spendthrift habit, by any fault of application or 
manly effort to improve his condition, then are we 
to speak not of his danger but of something worse — 
of a downfall of character already half completed. 
For it is the duty of every man to be a prosperous 
man, if by any reasonable effort he may. God calls 
us to industry and tempts us to it by all manner of 
promises. He lays it upon us as a duty to be dili- 
gent in business, to seek out ways of productive ex- 
ertion, to make our ^Ye talents ten and our ten tal- 
ents twenty. He is pleased with thrift and makes it 
the sister of virtue. Every shiftless character there- 
fore is a character so far lost to virtue. Give me 
then, as a minister of God's truth, a money-loving, 
prosperous, but strenuous and diligent hearer, and 
deliver me from one who has run down all his vigor 
and debauched every earnest capacity by his indo- 
lence or improvidence. What power can the stern 
arguments of religion and the earnest appeals of 
duty have to him, who has given up the effort to 
care for himself — the man to whom everything ear- 
nest is a burden, who is incapable of enterprise, rust- 
ing in his own indolence, lost to every manly pur- 
pose and responsibility. 

And what is true of the individual man is true 
even more emphatically of a community. An in- 
dustrious, enterprising, hopeful, prosperous com- 
munity is far more easily moved by the demands of 
duty and religion than one that is drooping and run- 
ning down. If prosperity is dangerous, decline is 
wellnigh fatal. The moment any people begin to 
decline and give themselves up to decay, religion 



140 PROSPERITY OUR DUTY 

droops, good morals decline, hope which is the nurse 
of character yields to desperation, low and sordid 
passions grow rank in the mould of decay, one 
blames another, society rots into fragments, and 
every good interest is blasted. Let our city for ex- 
ample, drop into a decline, let business of every kind 
become unprofitable, let capital withdraw itself and 
the young men of enterprise go abroad to seek their 
fortune in other places, let those ominous words '^ to 
let " be hung on many tenements, let the paint begin 
to wear off and a dingy look of decay to appear on 
the shops and dwellings, then too it will be found 
that religion and every good influence withers. The 
churches will begin also to wear a look of neglect 
and discouragement, and the ministers of religion 
will themselves droop at the altar. They will speak 
to a discouraged people whose life is dying out for 
want of hope. They cannot be as acceptable as be- 
fore, for nothing is acceptable. They cannot but 
flag themselves, for everything flags. Hope is one 
of the strongest supports of character; when there- 
fore hope dies, all efforts to sustain the upward aim 
and the elevating influences of religion are made 
at the worst disadvantage. An old decayed town, 
one that is forsaken of business and business men, 
becomes too a hive for all shiftless characters. The 
dilapidated tenements, cheapened in price, invite the 
thriftless and desperate of every sort to come in and 
try the last ends of fortune, — broken-down me- 
chanics, bankrupt tradesmen, political hacks, pander- 
ers to intemperance and all manner of vice, willing 
all to descend as low in their several trades as their 



PROSPERITY OUR DUTY 141 

necessities require. These are the characters to 
populate a ruin, answering to the owls and satyrs 
and dragons and other doleful creatures that con- 
gregated in the ruined cities of old, only more base 
and poisonous as they are more depraved. They 
are unclean spirits, bringing everyone his seven to 
occupy the places that are empty. Thus after a 
certain point is reached the motion of everything 
is downward. Religion, morals, society, all begin 
to sink in the common decay, ^o courage or hope 
being left, public spirit dies and with that public 
character, and with that private character. Intelli- 
gence, industry, good manners, piety, everything 
good yields to the common fate of decline, and noth- 
ing is left but a city of doleful creatures who are 
lost to this world, and with about equal certainty 
to the world to come. 

I look therefore upon the prosperity of our city 
as connected with the best hopes of virtue and re- 
ligion. If as a man of business and of property I 
should feel oppressed and discouraged by the pros- 
pect of its future decline, much more should I as a 
man whose office it is to stand for the law of God 
and the honor of his truth. If such a day shall ever 
come upon us, the worst business of all in Hartford 
will be that whose labor it is to make men better. 

If now I am right in these views, if it be true 
that a decline of prosperity is connected with results 
to morals and religion of a nature so disastrous, it 
follows irresistibly that it is our duty to prosper; 
only provided it be possible for us. For if God has 



142 PROSPERITY OUR DUTY 

given us the power, it cannot be less than a most 
sacred duty to save our city from a moral decay so 
abject and hopeless. It becomes therefore a se- 
rious question whether it is possible to maintain our 
growth and prosperity. 

Happily I have not one doubt that it is. And yet 
it may render the obligation that lies upon us more 
distinct, if we contemplate a few proofs that God 
has set in our way to encourage our confidence and 
stimulate us to our duty. To cite all the passages 
of Scripture that represent and promise prosperity, 
as the reward of faith in God and virtuous industry, 
is impossible. There is no doctrine of Scripture so 
often obtruded on the reader. God claims the right, 
in fact, to show the worth of his favor and the 
healthful power of his commandments by the bless- 
ings he will let fall on the good. He tries all modes 
of appeal, invents all glowing figures, that he may 
set forth the established connection between obedi- 
ence and virtue on one hand, and prosperity of every 
kind on the other. He speaks to the individual, de- 
claring that " the righteous man shall be like a tree 
planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth 
his fruit in his season; his leaf also shall not wither, 
and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper.'' He speaks 
to communities, declaring that " when it goeth well 
with the righteous the city rejoiceth; " and that 
" by the blessing of the upright the city is exalted." 
He accumulates examples of good men and times of 
public virtue, flourishing in luxuriance as boughs 
planted by wells of water, whose branches run over 
the wall and hang there laden with fruit before our 



PROSPERITY OUR DUTY 143 

eyes — men such as Jacob under Laban, Joseph in 
Egypt, David under Saul, Daniel at Babylon, Esther 
and ^ehemiah at the court of Persia, and, not least, 
the godly and devout prince named in my text, who 
may be taken as an example of all. He found the 
kingdom in a low and broken state and surrounded 
by great and powerful enemies, but by means of good 
laws and a purified religion he set everything on a 
footing of prosperity, so that ^^ he had exceeding 
much riches and honor." He made himself treas- 
uries, we are told, for silver and gold and for 
precious stones and for spices and for shields and 
for all manner of pleasant jewels; store-houses also, 
for the increase of corn and wine and oil, and stalls 
for all manner of beasts. Moreover he provided 
himself cities and possessions of flocks, for God had 
given him substance very much. Then to con- 
clude all it is added: "This same Hezekiah also 
stopped the upper water-course of Gihon and 
brought it straight down to the west side of the city 
of David. And Hezekiah prospered in all his 
works." In such and so many ways do the Script- 
ures represent to us the fixed connection between 
virtue and prosperity. It cannot, therefore, be any 
more difficult for this or any other community to 
prosper than it is to be virtuous. And as one is 
certainly possible, so must also be the other. 

'Nor is it only by authority of Scripture that we 
receive such a conclusion. IsTothing is better under- 
stood or oftener proved than that all virtuous in- 
dustry is connected, by a fixed law of nature, with 
growth and success. Prosperity and virtue are in- 



144: PROSPERITY OUR DUTY 

terwoven by God in the scale of being itself. Virt- 
ue is the appointed spring of prosperity, prosper- 
ity the badge and flower of virtue. 'Nor is it by any 
miracle or special grace that virtue receives her re- 
ward. For virtue is itself a creative power in its 
own nature, and can no more exist without some 
attendant increase than a substance without a 
shadow. It forbids idleness. It sets the powers in 
action. It produces self-government, and keeps all 
the passions and capacities both of body and mind 
in a healthy, conservative order. It proposes good 
aims and worthy ends, such as foster application, 
inspire energy and amplify all the capacities 
employed. It represses vice and extravagance, 
moderates reckless impulses, becomes a spring of 
order, patience, frugality, temperance and economy. 
Hence there is no so creative agent out of God's 
own nature as virtue. It is, in fact, a re-creative 
power under him, building the world to its own 
model and likeness, and holding as a rental for this 
purpose all the laws and resources of his realm. It 
opens the mines, levels the forests, builds up cities 
and empires, covers the earth with harvests and the 
sea with ships, piles up its stores of plenty, and 
makes the world itself the treasure-house of its 
works. Wherever there is public virtue and char- 
acter, therefore, there must be public prosperity ; for 
it is the fixed ordinance of God that all right indus- 
try shall bring increase of substance. 

On the whole, though it may not be possible in 
all cases for the individual to prosper, there is al- 
most never a community that cannot and will not, 



PROSPERITY OUR DUTY 145 

if it be only true to itself; for the chances that may 
overthrow an individual, such as a want of capacity, 
a loss of health, an unexpected fraud and the like, 
seldom comprehend a whole community. If a har- 
bor is closed up by an earthquake, if some rival 
city comes down with an armed force, as Florence 
did upon Pisa, to crush it; in these and other like 
cases a city may be justified in its decline. But ex- 
ceptions of this nature are few and need hardly be 
considered. The great truth is that God favors in- 
dustry, and has made the most bountiful arrange- 
ments to bless it. The scale of his providence is 
liberal, the laws of production are sure, so that any 
reasonable measure of effort and industry is infalli- 
bly connected with growth and abundance. 'No mat- 
ter how inauspicious the clime or how sterile the re- 
gion a people may occupy, even though placed on a 
barren rock in mid-ocean, their industry will make a 
pasture of the sea itself and wrest from the waters 
and the storms a fund of wealth and regular increase. 
If ever men had a right to lose their courage and 
give themselves up to dismal wasting, it was the first 
planters of our own New England. The shore was 
bleak and wild, the climate severe, the soil a meagre, 
flinty heritage. They had everything to create by 
their own patient industry out of lean and scanty 
harvests, and without a market. And yet they mul- 
tiplied their numbers and resources, spreading out 
from post to post, — conquering by stern efi^ort and 
economy a wealth continually increasing, till now* 
the most populous, richest, happiest portion of our 
* Written in 1847. 



146 PROSPERITY OUR DUTY 

great country is this same hard, frowning region of 
rocks and snows, on which they began to battle for 
a heritage. Well and manfully is it proved what 
power there is in character and industry to conquer 
prosperity anywhere. And yet this people have 
done only what it was their duty to do. Had they 
failed, they would have dishonored the principles 
they were called to illustrate, and God would have 
charged it as their crime against them. 

What then shall we say for Hartford, with such 
examples before us ? If industry and duty can make 
anything to prosper, it cannot be that a city pos- 
sessed of so many advantages, with so good a begin- 
ning, has a right to suffer any decline, or can, with- 
out some fault that is both dishonorable and crim- 
inal. I care not how many railroads compass us 
about, or how much of our former trade they with- 
draw. Be it that all our former resources and 
modes of increase are cut off. Still we have our 
hands and our wits left us. Our capital is ample; 
we hold a position at the head of a navigable river, 
in the bosom of a broad, fertile valley, surpassed by 
no other on the face of the globe for beauty and 
richness; we have a healthy and vigorous people 
and, compared with any other community, a fair 
measure of genius and enterprise ; and, what is more 
than all, virtue dwells in our houses, and God is with 
us at our altars. To say or to fear that such a 
people cannot prosper is even criminal. We have 
only to do what becomes us and we are safe. Many 
thought when the West Indian commerce was cut off 
that our city must be fatally ruined. Doleful 



PROSPERITY OUR DUTY 147 

prophecies were uttered in the streets, and doleful 
faces congregated to hear. But it has since been 
found that there are other things in the world be- 
sides West Indian commerce ; and so it will be found 
now if we have courage to look for them and a pli- 
ant skill to turn our hand with the times, that there 
are other things besides country groceries and mar- 
ket wagons. I do not undertake to say what we 
shall do or whither we shall turn. I only say that 
God never made such a city as Hartford and set it 
in a country like ours, where everything is on a tide 
of progress, to go down into decline and prostration, 
without some grievous and even shameful delin- 
quency. 

Besides, it will be a new thing in the history of 
mankind if any city or people are ruined by works 
of improvement. Such works may change the 
courses of trade and the modes of production; they 
may work temporary losses and hardships, but they 
will always be found in the end, if there be a prompt 
and manly spirit to turn them to account, to promote 
even the advantage of those who most suffer by 
them. The growth of every city helps the growth 
of every other; the prosperity of the world assists 
the prosperity of every part of it. There is no real 
war between the interests of cities and communities. 
'No real improvement is ever a source of permanent 
injury; for it is the fixed law of God that what ad- 
vances the wealth and happiness of the whole shall 
stand in final harmony with the good of every part. 
To believe therefore that railroads are going to de- 
stroy the prosperity of Hartford is to doubt a first 



148 PKOSPERITY OUR DUTY 

and fundamental law of society, if only we have tlie 
spirit to do what becomes ns. Rather should we 
judge that these instrumentalities which seem to 
threaten a present injury are destined, in the end, 
to establish our growth and invigorate our success. 

Let us then accept it as a fixed conclusion that 
our city can and ought to prosper. Let us take it 
in charge as our duty, under God, to make it pros- 
per; not doubting that if once we come to such a 
determination the result is sure. Meantime, let me 
add some suggestions and stimulants, which may set 
us forward in the way of our duty and thus in the 
way of success. 

First of all, we must renounce every thought and 
scheme which looks for prosperity at the expense of 
others. The only sound law of increase is the law 
of production. " Wealth gotten by vanity shall be 
diminished, but he that gathereth by labor shall in- 
crease." "We cannot thrive by plunder, or by any 
kind of strategy in which we seek to advance at the 
expense of others. The wealth that we desire we 
must also create, and what we are to add to our- 
selves must be measured by the values added by 
our industry to the common stock of the world's 
goods. We are not required to submit quietly to 
any kind of wrong, which under the pretext of im- 
provement robs us of our natural rights ; but to every 
other kind of improvement which assists the public 
good, however unfavorably it may affect us, we are 
bound to oppose no hindrance. To maintain that 
right enthusiasm which is the first condition of all 



PROSPERITY OUR DUTY 149 

sound growth and success, we must be worthy to 
prosper in our own sight. Our plans too must have 
that enlarged and friendly character that will make 
us worthy to prosper in the sight of others. There- 
fore it must be our study, not how we may cripple 
or thwart any rival interest, but how we may build 
up our own — how to earn most, how to develop our 
own resources and improve our own advantages. 
The hope that we may somehow thrive by chances 
and wise schemes may do to amuse the present hour, 
but it becomes us to know that other communities 
have as many chances and wise schemes as we. And 
the more we play with such temptations, the more 
we debauch our courage and chill our enthusiasm 
for better and more earnest struggles. It is time 
for us now to propose a more serious and certain 
method, namely, to gird on the harness of toil and go 
to the patient work of years to create within our- 
selves the prosperity we desire. 'Not that we are to 
forsake merchandise and betake ourselves to manu- 
factures. Trade is a power as truly creative as any 
other, only it does not show the values it creates as 
visibly. Many think of it as being only a sharp way 
of making profit without earning it; whereas by the 
selections and distributions it makes of goods, it as 
truly serves the public as if it changed their fabric 
by its industry. We are to set all our instruments 
and faculties at work together. We are to consider 
what possible improvements will assist our growth. 
We are to make up an inventory of our capital and 
the fund of creative powers we have in our people, 
and study in what way we may best employ and de- 



150 PKOSPERITY OUR DUTY 

velop all — confident always of this, that we have 
only to be true to ourselves and nourish the seeds 
of growth we possess, to be sure of all the progress 
we desire. 

In this view and as a mere matter of public econ- 
omy, saying nothing of higher motives, we must en- 
deavor to stimulate and perfect our schools. To 
unfold the creative talent and genius of our people 
must be one of our first studies, for in this our best 
hopes of prosperity lie. We can better afford any 
waste than the waste of talent, and it is deplorable 
to reflect on the immense fund of talent we have 
slumbering in unconsciousness or only half awa- 
kened, by reason of the defectiveness of our schools. 
The great first problem at the root of all prosperity 
is to produce the most condensed virtue and intel- 
lectual capacity possible; for if we may give to one 
man the capacity of three, then he will produce three 
times as much without consuming any more. So 
if you can open as much of manhood in ten as in 
thirty thousand people (which is far from difficult), 
you will have only ten for expenditure and thirty for 
production. Therefore, if you wish to make a city 
of ten thousand swell to a population of thirty thou- 
sand, the readiest and surest way is to make the ten 
thousand worth thirty thousand, by the stimulus of 
a right education. E'either need you be concerned 
to find out beforehand how the ten thousand will 
produce a threefold value by their industry. They 
will determine that for themselves. Having so 
much of manhood in them as a creative power, it 
will be sure to appear in ways of its own. ^Nothing 



PROSPERITY OUR DUTY 151 

is better understood than that a dull-minded family 
of mechanics, receiving low wages, will barely sub- 
sist, while a family that is quickened to inventiveness 
and skill will command as much higher wages as the 
values they produce are greater, and these will thrive 
in property, rise in character, become influential citi- 
zens, and act as stimulants to every kind of pros- 
perity. An active, spirited and scientific body of 
mechanics is a want everywhere and especially here, 
where the mechanical interest has hitherto been 
greatly depressed. We take up a prejudice that 
manufactures and trades of handicraft are unfavor- 
able to a state of public virtue, a prejudice that is 
refuted by facts on every side of us, and this preju- 
dice creates a loss of virtue even worse than the loss 
it deprecates. A visible discouragement rests upon 
most of the trades among us, and the effect is seen 
in a want of life, progress, cultivation and charac- 
ter; consequently in a want of that thrift and hope- 
fulness which are the springs of industrious virtue. 
One great mechanic rising into wealth and public 
note among us would rectify many false impressions 
and breathe new life and courage into all the me- 
chanic professions. I could speak of one such that 
we had in prospect a few years ago. I watched his 
opening genius with no little hope and admiration. 
But whether by our fault or not I cannot say, he 
was scarcely ripe for action before the better en- 
couragement offered him elsewhere withdrew him 
from us. Others doubtless we have among us now 
who are proving their genius in a similar manner, 
though unknown to me. Many others we have, be- 



152 PROSPERITY OUR DUTY 

yond all question, whose fine native capacity is rust- 
ing in dull obscurity and depression, never to be 
made conscious of itself, for want of a sufficiently 
quickening stimulus in our schools to bring it into 
action. For it is not nature alone that makes the 
man. Neither is it enough for us, when once a 
promising talent is unfolded, to detain it if possible 
among us by adequate encouragements and aids to 
success. If we yielded all the encouragement to 
talent that we might we should doubtless have more 
to encourage; but the living spark can be first kin- 
dled only by schools. It is the school that quickens 
curious thought, fills the mind with principles of sci- 
ence, and starts the inventive and creative powers 
into action. Therefore I say, push your schools to 
the highest possible limit of perfection. Spare no 
pains, count no expense; for rely upon it, whatever 
you may do to make a city of men will go to make 
a city. Let every talent, every type of genius, in 
every child, be watched and nurtured by the city, 
as by a mother watching for the signs of promise in 
her sons. 

At the same time, while we are endeavoring thus 
to create productive talent and power, it would be 
very unwise and absurd not to have an eye upon 
all the schools of destruction by which talent is 
blighted and industry corrupted. Here I touch a 
subject of which I have no words to speak as I could 
wish. It is appalling to the mind of every public- 
spirited citizen, watching for the welfare and honor 
of the city, to see how many gates of ruin we have 
opening on our streets. If we support schools of 



PROSPERITY OUR DUTY 153 

knowledge and virtue, we are also supporting schools 
of vice and destruction. And these two kinds of 
schools are set one against the other; one to create, 
the other to destroy; one to bless, the other to curse; 
one to prepare industry, the other to blast every good 
habit; one to call out talent and capacity, the other 
to brutalize and damn every divine faculty that God 
has given ; one to furnish and bring forth useful men, 
such as shall rise to honor and wealth in the virtuous 
callings of life, the other to rot men down into fel- 
ons and paupers, and make them a burden and a 
tax on industry itself. I walk the streets and I see 
the cormorants who keep these dens of vice coming 
up from below ground or out from above ground, 
and even daring to look virtuous men in the face, 
as if they had a right to breathe the same air and 
walk the same streets with men of character and 
citizens who honor and serve the city. I know not 
what can be done. Of this however I am quite 
sure, that if our citizens who love the city and wish 
to see it prosper had any right sense of what these 
men are doing, they would somehow find a way of 
relief. Suppose there were a military company 
quartered on our city by the government. How 
long should we submit to be thus preyed upon? But 
these men add not a cent to our income. They cre- 
ate nothing that has value. They are all quartered 
on the city, living at the public expense, and what 
is worst of all living on the consumption of talent, 
industry and all creative power. If the city were 
to take them all up as pensioners and support them 
and their families at the public expense, it would be 



154 PROSPERITY OUR DUTY 

a real gain to our wealth; for then we should save 
as clear profit all which they destroy. We think 
little of the loss we suffer by these vicious instru- 
mentalities, because it is so diffused and falls so ex- 
tensively in the first instance on the obscure and 
the poor. The greater is it and the more destructive 
on that account ; for it falls upon the broader surface 
and paralyzes the greater amount of power. Nei- 
ther let us think that, because it is only the roots 
of the tree that are killed, the tree itself is clear of 
harm. Could we ever be fairly rid of these vicious 
instrumentalities the saving would be equal, I am 
persuaded, in the mere scale of economy to the ac- 
cession of at least a half dozen wealthy citizens every 
year — an accession sufficient of itself to turn the 
scale of prosperity in any town not larger than 
this. 

Suppose now, for a moment, that by a right edu- 
cation and a wise protection of the public virtue, we 
could start into high creative action the whole lower 
stratum of our city, comprising the vicious, the idle, 
the unprogressive and thriftless of every sort, and 
set them all on the ascent; awaken their talents, en- 
courage their undertakings, secure them in temper- 
ate and frugal habits, inspire them with a sense of 
character and a will to rise, what a mass of dead 
expenditure would be cut off! Another savings 
bank is created and another and another, all over- 
flowing with deposits; the families happy, and the 
city, by the mere development of its creative virtue, 
expanding in population and wealth as never before 
in its happiest days. We should save enough thus 



PROSPERITY OUR DUTY 155 

out of the annual waste of our present city to build 
another and a greater in a very few years. 

While endeavoring in these and other like meth- 
ods to unfold our internal talents and resources, it 
will sometimes be required of us to undertake enter- 
prises of a more public character that may assist 
our growth. And then it becomes us to understand 
that what we do must be done promptly. I do not 
say hastily or blindly, but promptly. No man ever 
prospered who had not his eyes open, and did not 
stand ready to do the right thing at the right time. 
It is not enough to talk of doing something, we must 
act, and act before it is too late to act successfully. 
" In all labor there is profit, but the talk of the lips 
tendeth only to penury.'' Let our city once begin 
to decline, let it once go abroad that we are going 
down, and then everything conspires against us. 
We shall lack courage ourselves, and the public 
about us will help to rid us of what little we have 
left. To revive a decaying town is like raising the 
dead, for hope which is the life of all enterprise is 
gone. Therefore we must be beforehand. We 
must be alive to all our opportunities, and be ready 
to act for the public good as for our own, to strike 
at the right time and strike the right blow. 

Then again we must be united and strike together. 
" There be four things which are little upon the 
earth, but are exceeding wise, and the locust family 
is one. They have no king, yet they go forth all of 
them by bands." Public spirit is a great organific 
power in communities, and no community that is 
thoroughly animated by pubhc love can ever be pros- 



156 PROSPERITY OUR DUTY 

trated or defeated in its purposes. We must feel 
that we have one interest, and all ranks and classes 
must unite heartily in the pursuit of it. We must 
encourage the weak and lend what aid we can to the 
virtuous struggles of industry. Our men of busi- 
ness must support and strengthen each other. Those 
who have funds to invest should prefer investments 
here, even if it cost a nominal sacrifice. The best 
investment is that which most enlarges the heart, 
and no man who lets his bosom swell with public 
spirit to the city and feels the conscious pleasure 
that flows from serving its welfare will deem him- 
self a loser because of any trifling sacriflce. There 
must be no sectional conflicts, no political or party 
jealousy, no sectarian distance or division. Forgive 
me if I suggest a fear that there is something in the 
state of our society which is peculiar and has a bale- 
ful effect on our prosperity. I speak of a certain 
religious clannishness, which draws us into circles 
of a sectarian complexion. E^othing is more undig- 
nified or more opposed to the real object of society, 
which is to open the heart to man as man, and breed 
a state of courtesy and mutual regard between those 
who have different opinions and wear the diverse 
colors of actual life. ^ Nothing could be more fatal 
to anything like public spirit or to any practical 
unity of force in behalf of the common interest. We 
cannot flow together, — no warmth of feeling can be 
kindled for the public good. Society is divided, 
even down to the root. We are not people of Hart- 
ford, but we are Congregationalists, Episcopalians, 
Baptists, Methodists, — penned by our religion, im- 



PROSPERITY OUR DUTY 157 

pounded in it; as it were^ for safe keeping. What 
I say is not literally and exactly true, but proxi- 
mately; and the baleful effect is to be traced in all 
our affairs, creating a chill, souring the springs of 
feeling, and producing a virtual enmity out of that 
which should set us in love with all mankind. Such 
a habit of society cannot too soon be broken down. 
And if we cannot be otherwise rid of it, let us have 
it exorcised. Sometimes we are moved either by 
the bigotry we have within us, or by provocation 
from without, to say what does not perfectly justify 
the kinder charities we feel, and it is most unhappy 
if by any such means we embitter the springs of 
social life. Let all such fences that we may have 
raised up be broken down. We must have union 
or we cannot have strength, and union implies some- 
thing more than that we reside in the same city. 
There must be a fellow spirit, a social warmth, a 
living glow, and a common aim. 

But it is time for me to close. And let no one 
say that I have given you a discourse on the water 
project. I have only seized upon this occasion, 
when the question of your own prosperity is before 
you, as a favorable one to gain your attention to 
some useful suggestions. Ordinarily the prosper- 
ity or success of a community is not like to be ad- 
vanced by great artificial movements, though there 
are times and exigencies when a somewhat violent 
blow needs to be struck. The prosperity of a city 
is commonly developed by a slow process within it- 
self. It expands by force of its own virtues, and 
the creative power of its own industry. This is the 



158 PROSPERITY OUR DUTY 

main hope of every people, and what I have said has 
been chiefly designed for permanent effect in this 
direction; to impart courage, to create public re- 
sponsibility and public spirit; to impress a conviction 
of the value of talent and the ruinous and destructive 
power of vice; and thus to prompt us to united and 
vigorous action for all that concerns the common 
good. Neither let me seem to have meddled with 
that which is not within my sphere. I see blended 
in this great subject all the dearest interests of virt- 
ue and religion for ages to come. If we of to-day 
are recreant to our duty and allow this city, which 
God has made our heritage and that of our chil- 
dren, to go down into decline, the cause of virtue 
and the church of God will suffer as deeply as the 
fortunes of business; and that by a ruin as much 
more deplorable as it is a cause more sacred and 
closer to immortality. To avert any such possible 
evil, every man is called to lend his voice and his 
influence. Nor is there any office too sacred to be 
employed in blessing the hopes of industry and 
sanctifying the bonds of public love. Dismiss then 
every discouraged thought. Take it as a fixed truth 
that our city can prosper; therefore that it ought; 
therefore, that it shall. Go then every man to his 
own altar and live a godly life; every man to his 
work and do it manfully and well; and all together 
to the task of preserving the public virtue and prov- 
ing to mankind, in despite of all hindrance, the un- 
alterable truth that growth and progress are the 
right, under God, of every people that will do their 
duty. 



YIII 
EEVEESES :N'EEDED * 

If thou faint in the day of adversity, thy strength is 
small. — Proverbs xxiv. 10. 

Adversity kills only where there is weakness to be 
killed. Real vigor is at once tested and fed by it, 
seen to be great as the adversity mastered is great, 
and also to be made great by the mastering. This 
too is the common feeling of mankind, for thus only 
comes it to be a proverb or current maxim. And the 
proverb holds good of all sorts of strength, that of the 
muscles and that of the nerves, that which lies in res- 
olution and that which comes by faith in God, that 
which is moral and that which is religious, that which 
is personal and that which is national, that which be- 
longs to civil administration and that which pertains 
to the deeds of arms. Small is the strength, any- 
where and everywhere, that cannot stand adversity, 
and small will it stay and smaller will it grow to the 
end. 

Last Sunday morning when you were assembled 
here in the sacred quiet of worship, the patriot sol- 
diers of your army — that to which you had contrib- 

* Delivered on the Sunday after the disaster of Bull Kun, in the 
North Church, Hartford, July, 1861. 

159 



160 REVERSES NEEDED 

uted your sons, your fellow citizens and your money, 
that whose preparations and advances you had 
watched with exulting confidence and with expecta- 
tion eager as the love you bore to your dear country 
itself — were being joined in battle with its enemies; 
thus to have their terrible worship in the day-long sac- 
rifice of blood, before the belching cannon of the foe 
and among their charging hosts of cavalry, on a field 
that was itself their enemy. If it was unnecessary, 
it is much to be regretted that the battle should have 
been given upon that day; but if it was necessary, 
then I know not any cause more worthy of the day or 
any offering that could be deeper in sacrifice, or in 
fact more dutiful to God. The tidings of the even- 
ing came, and it was so far victory. Many were ex- 
ultant, but some of us lay down that night oppressed 
with dreadful forebodings. In the news of the morn- 
ing it was defeat and flight and carnage and loss. Our 
fine army was gone, our hopes were dashed, our hearts 
sunk down struggling as it were in agony, and our 
fancy broke loose in the imagination of innumerable 
perils. We imagined the enemy rushing back on 
Harper's Ferry and across into Maryland, or down 
upon the Potomac to cut off the passage of the river, 
then upon the great fortress of the Chesapeake, to 
drive in that portion of the army and beleaguer the 
fortress. We imagined also a political reaction, a 
difiiculty of obtaining recruits, a loss of credit and 
means for the war in the money market, the probable 
interference with our blockade by France and Eng- 
land, and finally a general outbreak of factiousness 
and disorder amounting to a disorganization of the 



REVERSES NEEDED 161 

Government. At any rate the struggle must be in- 
definitely protracted, and the public burdens and dis- 
tresses indefinitely increased. 

These first apprehensions are already quieted in 
part. The loss turns out to be less than was feared, 
the retreat to be less completely a flight. The enemy 
are quite as much crippled as we. And what is more, 
a great deal, to our feeling and our future energy, we 
have the grand satisfaction of knowing that our sol- 
diers fought the day out in prodigies of valor. Let us 
thank God for this and count some fraction at least 
of victory. Let us also thank God for what is already 
made clear that our spirit as a people is not quelled, 
but that we find ourselves beginning at once to meet 
our adversity with a steady and stout resolve, pushing 
forward new regiments and preparing to double the 
army already raised. The flash of feeling is over, 
the bubble of egregious expectation is burst, but 
the fire of duty burns only the more intensely, and the 
determination of sacrifice is as much more firmly set 
as it is more rationally made. The Government also 
is more instructed than it could be without this dis- 
aster, and is bracing itself to its work with tenfold 
energy. The army also has a new leader, in whose 
conduct we may rest with more implicit confidence. 
So that in the future our chances of defeat are really 
many times fewer than they were or even could have 
been before, when it seemed to be so very certain 
that we could not fail. Our adversity, since we be- 
gan to bear it, is already increasing our strength. 

What is now to be done it is not for me to show; 
that belongs to the Government. I will only say that 



162 REVERSES NEEDED 

some things are to be done by us that belong to our 
duty as good citizens. As good citizens we are not, 
for example, to busy ourselves overmuch in finding 
who is to blame, and scolding one party or another in 
the administration of the Government or the army. 
]^othing will more fatally break down our confidence 
or chill our enthusiasm. One thing at least is clear, 
that the Government must govern. And if some mis- 
takes have been made, in what great cause have they 
not? There may be some incompetent persons in the 
Government and the ofiicering of the army ; but infal- 
lible competency — where has it been found ? Besides 
the mistakes have been discovered and the incompe- 
tent men are in a way to be weeded out of their places. 
We want no more a driving force outside of the Gov- 
ernment to press it forward when it is not ready ; no 
more a guiding force to thrust external judgments in 
upon its plans. To speak more plainly still, we want 
no newspaper government, and least of all a newspa- 
per army. A pasteboard government or pasteboard 
army were just as much better, as it is less noisy and 
less capable of mischief. Let the Government gov- 
ern, and the army fight, and let both have their own 
counsel, disturbed and thrown out of balance by no 
gusty conceit or irresponsible and fanatical clamor. 

But the main point for us now is to get ourselves 
ready for the grand struggle we are in by duly con- 
ceiving the meaning of it, and receiving those settled 
convictions that will stay by us in all the changing 
moods we are to pass and the discouragements we 
are to encounter. This immense enthusiasm, bursting 
forth spontaneous in a day, and fusing us into a com- 



REVERSES NEEDED 163 

plete unity — how great and thrilling a surprise has it 
been to us ! I know of nothing in the whole compass 
of human history at all comparable to it in sublimity. 
It verily seems to be, in some sense, an inspiration of 
God ; and it is even difficult to shut away the sugges- 
tion that innumerable sacrifices and prayers laid up 
for us by the patriot fathers of the past ages were be- 
ing mixed in now with our feeling, and by God's will 
heaving now in our bosom. See, we have been say- 
ing, what an immense loyalty there is in our people 1 
How the simple sight of our flag kindles a fire in us 
that was never kindled by any grandest impersonation 
of heroism and historic royalty ! It is even so, and we 
thank God for the revelation; but this loyalty is no 
fixed fact, it becomes us to know, as long as it only 
fires our passion. It must get hold of our solid con- 
victions and bum itself through into our moral nat- 
ure itself in order to become reliable and sure. It 
must be struck by sacrifice, drilled into the very bone 
of our substance by persistent struggles with adver- 
sity, and then it will stand, then it is loyalty complete. 
To sail out gayly in a breeze singing patriotic songs is 
a good enough beginning of the voyage, but a hurri- 
cane or two or merely a bad leak discovered will take 
all that away, and then a good steerage at the helm 
and a true compass and a sturdy, stout resolve, kept 
up through long watchings and exhaustive labors — 
these only will at last bring in the ship. What I wish 
then more especially on the present occasion is to 
speak, not to impulse but to conviction; not to cry 
" forward," " forward to Eichmond," or forward 
to some other where beyond, but to go over a calm 



164 REVERSES NEEDED 

revision of tlie matter of the war itself, showing what 
it means and the great moral and religions ideas 
that are struggling to the birth in it — possibly to 
be duly born only in great throes of adversity and 
sacrifice. 

It is a remarkable but very serious fact, not suf- 
ficiently noted as far as my observation extends, that 
our Kevolutionary fathers left us the legacy of 
this war in the ambiguities of thought and principle 
which they suffered in respect to the foundations of 
government itself. The real fact is that, without pro- 
posing it or being distinctly conscious of it, they or- 
ganized a government such as we at least have under- 
stood to be without moral or religious ideas; in one 
view a merely man-made compact, that without some- 
thing further, which in fact was omitted or even phi- 
losophically excluded, could never have more than a 
semblance of authority. More it has actually had, 
because our nature itself has been wiser and deeper 
and closer to God than our political doctrines ; but we 
have been gradually wearing our nature down to the 
level of our doctrines; breeding out, so to speak, the 
sentiments in it that took hold of authority, till at last 
we have brought ourselves down as closely as may be 
to the dissolution of all nationality and all ties of 
order. Hence the war. It has come just as soon 
as we made it necessary, and not a day sooner. And 
it will stay on to the end of our history itself unless 
the mistake we have suffered is, at least practically, 
rectified. We have never been a properly loyal peo- 
ple ; we are not so now save in the feeling or flame of 



REVERSES NEEDED 165 

the hour. Our habit has been too much a habit of 
disrespect, not to persons only, but to law. Govern- 
ment, we say or have been saying, is only what we 
make ourselves, therefore we are at least upon a level 
with it ; we too made the nationality, and can we not 
as well unmake it ? 

That we may duly understand this matter, go back 
a moment to the Revolution, and trace the two very 
distinct, yet in a certain superficial sense, agreeing 
elements that entered into it. First there was what, 
for distinction's sake, we may call the historic ele- 
ment, represented more especially by the ^ew Eng- 
land people. The political ideas were shaped by re- 
ligion — so far church ideas. The church for exam- 
ple was a brotherhood; out of that grew historically 
the notions of political equality in the state. Gov- 
ernment also was conceived to be for the governed, 
just as the church was for the members; and both 
were God's institutes — ordinances of God. The ma- 
jor vote in both was but a way of designating rulers, 
not the source of their sovereignty or spring of their 
authority. Designated by us, their investiture was 
from God, the only spring of authority. Their text 
for elective government was the same that our Hart- 
ford Hooker used, when preaching in 1638 for the 
Convention which framed our State Constitution — 
the first constitution of the new world, and type of all 
the others that came after, even that of the nation it- 
self : " Take you wise men, and understanding, and 
known among your tribes, and / will make them rul- 
ers over you/'^ God was to be the head of authority, 
and the rulers were to have their authority from him. 



166 REVERSES NEEDED 

Such was the historic training that preceded and pre- 
pared this wing of the Revolution. 

The other wing was prepared by sentiments wholly 
different; such, for example, as are sufficiently well 
represented in the life and immense public influence 
of Mr. Jefferson ; a man who taught abstractively, not 
religiously, and led the unreligious mind of the time 
by his abstractions. It was not his way to deal in 
moral ideas of any kind. Familiar with the writ- 
ings of Rousseau and the generally infidel literature 
of the French nation, his mind was, to say the least, 
so far dominated by them as to work entirely in their 
moulds. He had no conception of any difficulty in 
making a complete government for the political state 
by mere human composition, following Rousseau's 
theory, which discovers the foundation of all govern- 
ment in a " social compact.'' Going never higher 
than man, or back of man, he supposed that man could 
somehow create authority over man; that a machine 
could be got up by the consent of the governed that 
would really oblige or bind their consent ; not staying 
even to observe that the moment anything binds or 
takes hold of the moral nature, it rules by force of a 
moral idea, and touches by the supposition some 
throne of order and law above the range of mere hu- 
manity. Covered in by this immense oversight, he 
falls back on the philosophic, abstractive contempla- 
tion of men, and finding them all so many original 
monads with nothing historic in them as yet, he says : 
Are they not all equal? Taking the men thus to be 
inherently equal in their natural prerogatives and 
rights, he asks their consent, makes the compact^ 



REVERSES NEEDED 167 

and that is to be tlie grand political liberty of tbe 
world. 

But the two great wings thus described can agree, 
you will see, in many things, only saying them always 
in a different sense ; one in a historic, the other in an 
abstractive, theoretic sense ; one in a religious, and the 
other in an atheistic; both looking after consent and 
the major vote, both going for equality, both wanting 
Articles of Agreement, and finally both a Constitu- 
tion. And the result is that in the consent, in the 
major vote, in the equality, in the Articles of Agree- 
ment, in the Constitution, Christianity in its solid 
and historic verity as embodied in the life of a people 
joins hands, so to speak, with what have been called, 
though in a different view, the " glittering generali- 
ties " of Mr. Jefferson. Thus in drawing the Decla- 
ration of Independence he puts in by courtesy the 
recognition of a Creator and creation, following on 
with his " self-evident truths,'' such as that " all men 
are created equal,'' and that ^^ governments derive 
their just powers from the consent of the governed ; " 
in which too the other wing of the revolution can well 
enough agree, only they will take them, not as abstrac- 
tions, but in a sense that is qualified and shaped by 
their history. They had nothing to do with some 
theoretic equality in man before government, in 
which as a first truth of nature governments are 
grounded. They were born into government, and 
they even believed in a certain sacred equality under 
it as their personal right. They had also elected their 
rulers, and so far they could agree to the right of a 
government by consent, but they never had assumed 



168 KEVERSES NEEDED 

that men are ipso facto exempt from obligation who 
have not consented, or that an autocratic and princely 
government is of necessity void and without " just 
power." Their " equality," their " consent," were 
the divine right of their history from the landing of 
the fathers downward and before the French Ency- 
clopaedists were born. 

You will thus perceive that two distinct or widely 
different constitutional elements entered into our po- 
litical order at the beginning ; that agreeing in forms 
of words they were yet about as really not in agree- 
ment, and have in fact been struggling in the womb 
of it like Jacob and Esau from the first day until 
now. 

We have not always been conscious of the fact, yet 
so it has been. On one side we have had the sense of 
a historic and morally binding authority, freedom 
sanctified by law and law by God himself, living as it 
were in a common, all-dominating nationality forti- 
fied and crowned by moral ideas. On the other, we 
have not so much been obeying as speculating, draw- 
ing out our theories from points back of all history — 
theories of compact, consentings, reserved rights, 
sovereignties of the people and the like — till finally 
we have speculated almost everything away, and find 
that actually nothing is left us but to fight out the 
question whether we shall have a nationality or not ; 
whether we shall go to pieces in the godless platitudes 
or stand fast and live under laws and institutions 
sanctified by a providential history. Proximately 
our whole difficulty is an issue forced by slavery ; but 
if we go back to the deepest root of the trouble, we 



REVERSES NEEDED 169 

shall find that it comes of trying to maintain a gov- 
ernment without moral ideas and to concentrate a 
loyal feeling aronnd institutions that, as many rea- 
son, are only human compacts, entitled of course, if 
that be all, to no feeling of authority or even of 
respect. 

I have spoken thus of Mr. Jefferson and of his 
opinions, not as invoking the old party prejudice 
against him long ago buried; I join no issue with his 
reputed infidelity; I only charge that he brought in 
modes of thought and philosophy as regards political 
matters which are none the less bitterly pernicious in 
that they were patriotically meant; and that his 
name gained a currency for them that has made 
them even identical, as thousands really conceive, 
with our institutions themselves. 

Glance along down the track of our history now, 
and see how these ideas have been letting us regular- 
ly down toward the present disruption of order ; how 
the moral ideas that constitute the only real basis of 
government — of ours as of all others — are ignored, 
omitted, or quite frittered away by their action. 

Our statesmen or politicians, not being generally 
religious men, take up with difficulty conceptions of 
government or the foundations of government that 
suppose the higher rule of God. They are not athe- 
ists, but such modes of thought are not in their plane. 
When they hear it affirmed that ^' the powers that be 
are ordained of God," they think it may be very good 
in the 'New Testament and the ministers and pious 
people to compliment their religion by such a tribute, 



170 REVERSES NEEDED 

but that their scripture notion is forced and far- 
fetched. It signifies nothing, in the way of qual- 
ifying such an impression, that every human soul is 
configured to civil as to parental authority, bowing 
to any government actually existing, autocratic or 
elective, with a felt obligation when it rules well. As 
little does it signify that God, as certainly as there is 
a God, dominates in all history, building all societies 
into forms of order and law and that when constitu- 
tions are framed by men they were as really framed 
by God, the grand universal Protector of society, and 
are nothing in fact but the issuing into form of a 
government that he before implanted in the social or- 
ders and historic ideas of the people ; possible there- 
fore to be framed and to hold the binding force of 
laws, because God himself has prepared them and 
stamped them with his own providential sovereignty. 
Sometimes too the politicians are a little annoyed, 
as we may see, by this foisting in of the claims of 
religion. What has religion to do with political mat- 
ters ? What has the church to do with the state? 
As if the state were really outside of God's preroga- 
tive and he had nothing to do with it ! — nothing to do 
with the marshalling and well ordering and protect- 
ing rule of society ! 

So they fall off easily into the " glittering general- 
ities," and begin to theorize about compacts, consent- 
ings and the like, building up our governmental order 
from below. First of all they clear the ground by a 
sweeping denial, rejoicing in the discovery that all 
claims of divine right in government are preposterous. 
If they only meant by this that all claims to govern 



REVERSES NEEDED 171 

wrong by divine right are a baseless and dreadful 
hypocrisy, it would be well; but they really conceive 
that government is now to rule without any divine 
right at all ; as if there were any such thing as a right 
that is not divine right and has not God's eternal sanc- 
tions going with it ; any such thing as authority in law 
that is not centred in God and pronounced in the 
moral nature by him. 

They do not perceive that God is joined to all right 
and all defences of right in society by the eternal ne- 
cessity of his nature — stands by them, makes them 
his own, clothes them with his own everlasting author- 
ity ; hence that all law gets the binding force of law. 

But the ground is clear — religion is one thing, gov- 
ernment is another — and now there is nothing to do 
but to find how man can make or does make a govern- 
ment without God or any divine sanction. Well, 
man is the fact given, government the problem. And 
the man being a complete individual, independent and 
sole arbiter of his own actions and exactly equal, so 
far at least, to every other, he may choose if he please 
never to have any government at all. But he con- 
sents, and there government begins. He surrenders 
a part of his own rights, and what he surrenders goes 
to make the government. The government is, of 
course, a compact. The major vote chooses the rulers, 
and the people are the sovereign head whence all law 
and authority emanate. To them only the rulers are 
responsible, being in fact their agents, administering 
a trust for them. And this, it is conceived, is a true 
account of civil government, our own constitutional 
government. 



172 REVERSES NEEDED 

These now are the saws of our current political phi- 
losophy, figuring always in the speeches and political 
speculations of our statesmen from the Revolution 
downward. They could many of them be true enough 
were they qualified so as to let in God and religion, or 
so as to meet and duly recognize the moral ideas of 
history ; but taken as they are meant, they are about 
the shallowest, chafiiest fictions ever accepted by a 
people as the just account of their laws. 

Let there be no misunderstanding here; I am not 
complaining of the laws or the constitutions; better 
and more beneficent never existed. I am only com- 
plaining of the account that is made of them, the phi- 
losophy that is given of their grounds and underly- 
ing principles. They represent in fact our history, 
moral and religious ; never in any sense the false rea- 
sons by which we strip them of their sanctity. 

There was never, in the first place, any such prior 
man or body of men to make a government. We are 
born into government as we are into the atmosphere, 
and when we assume to make a government or consti- 
tution, we only draw out one that was providentially 
in us before. We could not have a king or a nobility, 
for example, in this country; for there was no mate- 
rial given out of which to make either one or the other. 
The church life and order was democratic too. The 
whole English constitution also was in us before. In 
these facts, prepared in history by God, our institu- 
tions lie. We did not make them. We only sketched 
them, and God put them in us to be sketched. And 
when that is done they are his, clothed with his divine 
sanction as the Founder and Protector of states. 



REVERSES NEEDED 173 

Again, neither we nor any other people ever made a 
civil compact, except as it was virtually made by God 
before ; never surrendered a part of our natural self- 
government to endow the government of the State. 
"We never had, in fact, any one right of a government 
to surrender. What human being ever had or by 
any conceivable method could have, as being simply a 
man, the right to legislate or to punish or to make war 
or to levy taxes or to enforce contracts and the pay- 
ment of debts or to summon witnesses ? On the con- 
trary we go into the civil state for nothing but to get 
our rights and have them secured — all the rights we 
have. 

So of what is called the inherent, natural right of 
self-government in a state and the right of a govern- 
ment by the major vote. Is it so, that no great people 
of the world ever had a lawful or legitimate right to 
rule but our own ? And how constantly when we 
say it does the sense of some preposterous assumption 
creep over the mind of every ordinarily sensible man, 
raising the suspicion that after all the institutions of 
his country are hollow and baseless — even as the the- 
ory given to account for them is plainly seen to be. 

So again of the popular sovereignty, the natural 
sovereignty of the people. If we understand our- 
selves, the people are no more sovereign and have no 
better right to be than any single ruler has when rul- 
ing in the succession of birth, if he only takes his 
power in the true historic way of his country and rules 
well. The real truth is, after all, that our popular 
vote or choice is only one way of designating rulers, 
and the succession of blood another; both equally 



174 REVERSES NEEDED 

good and right when the historic order makes them 
so. And then the laws, legitimated by history and 
clothed in that manner with a divine right, rule over 
all — over the elections, over the successions; then 
over the rulers as truly as the subjects. 

Meantime what results, but that we get a govern- 
ment under these fictions of theory which, by the 
supposition, is no government? It is only a copart- 
nership, and has no national authority, no obligation. 
How can a copartnership amount to a governing 
power over the parties in it ? If they agree to legis- 
late, it does not make them a legislature. What are 
their rulers but committees or agents, and what can 
they do that amounts to government more than the 
committees, agents, directors of a bank? Their ^' be 
it enacted " has no force of law; it is only their agree- 
ment or consent, which binds nobody, touches no con- 
science. They get no authority till we see them 
authorized to legislate by God. !No thing touches the 
conscience and becomes morally binding that is not 
from above the mere human level. Laws become 
laws only when there is felt to be some divine right in 
them, some voice of God speaking in them. 

Now in all these schemings of theory, by which we 
have been contriving how to generate or claiming 
that we have generated a government without going 
above humanity, we lose out all moral ideas and take 
away all tonic forces necessary to government. Our 
merely terrene, almost subterranean, always godless 
fabric, becomes more and more exactly what we have 
taken it to be in our philosophy. The habit of re- 
spect dies out in us; we respect nothing; authority 



REVERSES NEEDED 175 

is more and more completely ignored. What author- 
ity have laws, when there is no sovereignty back of 
them or in them but that of the people ? The grand, 
historic, religious element is worn away or supplanted 
thus by what we take to be our wiser philosophy, and 
the spirit of loyalty runs down to be a mere feeling 
of attachment, so weak that we are scarcely con- 
scious of it, to our mere compacts and man-made 
sovereignties. 

Meantime our descent is accelerated in the same di- 
rection by the demoralizing forces of peace and unex- 
ampled prosperity, and m ore than all by the scrambles 
of party and the venal intrigues of political lead- 
ers and rulers, till finally we reach a state where the 
government is chiefly valued for what can be gotten 
out of it by the farming of its revenues and offices and 
contracts. Reverence to its honor, care for its safety, 
integrity in maintaining it, willingness to make sacri- 
fices for it, all give way, and an awful recklessness 
respecting it or what becomes of it is visible on every 
side. 

And again the same descent is accelerated by the 
essentially immoral, or unmoral, habit of slavery, 
breeding as it does an imperious, violent, unsubordi- 
nated character in the minds that are trained in it. 
They do not live in law and make nothing of obliga- 
tion or duty; but they grow up into their will, into 
self-assertion, into force and bloody passion and all 
the murderous barbarities misnamed chivalry. To be 
a man is to be above obedience ; and to speak of duty, 
conscience, obedience to God, is the same thing 
whether in young or old as to be a poltroon or a 



176 REVERSES NEEDED 

sneak. And this wild, self-willed habit grows worse 
and worse by continuance ; being gradually bred into 
the stock, as all habits are, and becoming a naturally 
propagated quality; till finally a people is produced, 
or will be, that are really incapable of law or sound 
government — unfit to be rulers, incapable of being 
ruled. 

But the grand crowning mischief is yet to be 
named. Out of these baseless, unhistoric, merely 
speculated theories of government, and the grad- 
ual demoralization of our habit under them, a doc- 
trine of state rights is finally to emerge and organize 
the armed treason that explodes our nationality. Our 
political theories never gave us a real nationality but 
only a copartnership, and the armed treason is only 
the consummated result of our speculations. Where 
nothing exists but a consent, what can be needed to 
end it but a dissent ? And if the States are formed 
by the consent of individuals, was not the general gov- 
ernment formed by the consent of the States ? What 
then have we to do but to give up the partnership of 
the States when we will ? If a tariff act is passed dis- 
pleasing to some States they may rightfully nullify 
it; if a President is elected not in the interest of 
slavery they may secede ; that is, withdraw their con- 
sent and stand upon their reserved rights. ^' By nat- 
ure," says Mr. Calhoun — so runs the argument — 
" every individual has the right to govern himself, 
and governments must derive their right from the 
assent, express or implied, of the governed, and sub- 
ject to such limitations as they may impose.'' . . . 
" Indeed, according to our theory, governments are 



REVEKSES NEEDED 177 

in their nature but trusts, and those appointed to ad- 
minister them trustees or agents, to execute trust 
powers. The sovereignty resides elsewhere, in the 
people, not in the government, and with us the peo- 
ple mean the people of the several States." Then 
of course it follows in the exact strain, as anyone 
may see, of our philosophy or cant, misnamed phi- 
losophy, that the States have a right to nullify or 
secede at will. And so our brave abstractions that 
we began with come to their issue finally in a most 
brave conclusion that is every way worthy of them. 
'No matter that the Constitution asserts in a hundred 
ways the essential and perpetual supremacy of the 
Government. No matter that it was given to the 
States to be ratified, in that way to cut off eternally 
all pretences of sovereignty in themselves ; no matter 
that more than a full half of the States now existing 
were actually created and organized by the general 
Government on its own territory. ^Neither is it any- 
thing that we are landed in the very strange predica- 
ment of being a people, the only one ever heard of in 
the world, without a nationality. Is the nationality 
in the States? No, that was never so much as 
thought of. Is it in the general Government? I^To, 
that is philosophically denied. And so we are left 
to the luckless condition of being no nation at all 
and having no nationality anywhere! We began 
with a godless theorizing, and we end, just as we 
should, in discovering that we have not so much as 
made any nation at all. We scorned this State 
rights theory at first, but we have been bidding many 
years for the casting vote of the South and selling out 



178 REVERSES NEEDED 

the nation to pay, and tlie doctrine, meantime, has 
been creeping worm-like and silently into the !N^orth, 
till many have begun to give into it scarcely knowing 
when it arrived. Finally the secession, argned for as 
a right, begins to be planned for as a fact. Even Cab- 
inet ministers in the Government were preparing it 
more than a year ago, as is well ascertained, contriv- 
ing how to break down the credit of the Government, 
how to empty the armories by a transfer of arms, how 
to Aveaken the defences, how to corrupt the allegiance 
of the army. And now at last the fact itself is come, 
the secession is made — hence the war. 

If now you have followed me in this exposition, you 
have seen how our want of moral ideas and our com- 
monly accepted philosophy of government, coupled 
with other demoralizing and disintegrating influences 
in our scheme of society, both I^orth and South, have 
been drawing us down to this from the first. We 
have come to the final break and disaster, just as soon 
as we must, not a day sooner. Gravity was never surer 
in the precipitation of a stone or more regular in the 
downward pull and pressure. 

And what is it now that is arming to assert and es- 
tablish the broken nationality? 'Not religion cer- 
tainly — it does not appear that our people are con- 
sciously more given to religion than they have been — 
yet, in another view, it is no other than the old his- 
toric-religious element in which our nationality has 
been grounded from the first; that which has been 
smothered and kept under by the specious fictions we 
have contrived to account for the government without 



REVERSES NEEDED 179 

reference to God or to moral ideas. Yes, it is this old, 
implicitly, if not formally, religious element that is 
struggling out again now, clad all over in arms, to 
maintain the falling nationality. It looked on the 
Sumter flag, the Stars and Stripes shot through and 
shot down by traitors, and as it looked took fire. What 
a wonder is it even to ourselves to see the blaze that is 
kindled! We call it loyalty — we did not imagine 
that we had it ! What a grand, rich sentiment it is ! 
See what strength it has ! See how it raises common 
men into heroes ! See the bloody baptism wherewith 
it is able to be baptized, and how it pours the reg- 
iments on, down the rivers and over the mountains 
and round the promontories, to hurl their bodies 
against the armed treason! The mere feeling, the 
passion, if we so choose to call it — is not the bliss of it 
worth even the cost of the war? What in fact is 
more priceless to a nation than great sentiments ? So 
we bless ourselves in the loyalty of the hour, and the 
more that there certainly is some latent heat of relig- 
ion in the blaze of it. 

But more is wanted, and God is pressing us on to 
the apprehending of that for which we are appre- 
hended. Our passion must be stiffened and made a 
fixed sentiment, as it can be only when it is penetrated 
and fastened by moral ideas. And this requires ad- 
versity. As the dyers use mordants to set in their 
colors, so adversity is the mordant for all sentiments 
of morality. The true loyalty is never reached till 
the laws and the nation are made to appear sacred, or 
somewhat more than human. And that will not be 
done till we have made long, weary, terrible sacrifices 



180 REVERSES NEEDED 

for it. Without shedding of blood there is no such 
grace prepared. There must be reverses and losses 
and times of deep concern. There must be tears in 
the houses as well as blood in the fields ; the fathers 
and mothers, the wives and dear children, coming 
into the woe to fight in hard bewailings. Desolated 
fields, prostrations of trade, discouragements of all 
kinds, must be accepted with unfaltering, unsubdua- 
ble patience. Religion must send up her cry out of 
houses, temples, closets, where faith groans heavily 
before God. In these and all such terrible throes the 
true loyalty is born. Then the nation emerges at last 
a true nation, consecrated and made great in our eyes 
by the sacrifices it has cost! There is no way 
but just this to make a nation great and holy in the 
feeling of its people. And it is never raised in this 
manner till it has fought up some great man or hero 
in whom its struggles and victories are fitly person- 
ated. One really great man or commander we cer- 
tainly have, mercifully preserved to us to be the 
centralizing head of our confidence, and to fulfil his 
sublime charge of fatherhood in the conduct of our 
great affairs. But he belongs in a sense to the past 
and will soon be gone. We want another that belongs 
more properly to the future, the new and great future. 
And such an one cannot be made to order or by any 
brief holiday campaigning. He must be long enough 
and deep enough in the struggle to be crowned as the 
soldier of Providence. Most deeply do we want such 
a man, a new Washington, but still a man of 
his age and time. True, these Washingtons are ex- 
pensive; they cost how many sacrifices, how many 



REVERSES NEEDED 18l 

tliousands of lives, what rivers of tears and blood and 
money ! And yet they are cheap ! Our old Wash- 
ington — what would we take for him now ? Give us 
grace, O thou God of the land, only to deserve and pa- 
tiently wait and sturdily fight for another ; so for the 
establishment of our glorious nationality and the ever- 
lasting expulsion of those baseless, godless theories 
which our fathers let in to corrupt and filch away the 
principles of right and law-begirt liberty, for which 
in fact they bled ! 

But this is war, we shall be told, and war is certain- 
ly no such moral affair. How then do we expect any 
such moral regeneration to come out of it ? In one 
view the objection is good; war is a great demoralizer, 
throwing back on society men who have been hardened 
and made desperate, often, by the vices and reckless 
violences of camp life. But the same is true of peace ; 
that also has its dangers and corruptions ; breeding, 
finally, all most selfish, unheroic and meanest vices, 
untoning all noblest energies, making little men and 
loose and low, ignorant of sacrifice and scarcely mean- 
ing it even when they cleave to their virtues. Peace 
will do for angels, but war is God's ordinance for sin- 
ners, and they want the schooling of it often. In 
time of war what a sense of discipline is forced ! Here 
at least there must be and will be obedience ; and the 
people outside get the sense of it about as truly as the 
army itself. Here authority towers high, and the 
stern necessities of the field clothe it with honor. Gov- 
ernment is here sharpened to a cutting edge. All the 
laxities of feeling and duty are drawn tight. Princi- 
ples and moral convictions are toned to a practical su- 



182 REVERSES NEEDED 

premacy. Hence the remarkable fact that the old 
Romans were the sternest of all ancient people in their 
morality. The military drill of their perpetual war- 
fare brought them into the sense of order and law and 
the fixed necessity of obedience to rule. And so they 
became the great law-nation of the world, producing 
codes and rescripts that have been the stock matter 
of all the civil codes and tribunals even of the modern 
nations. 

E'either is it any objection that ours is a civil war, 
however much we may seem to be horrified by the 
thought of it. Where a civil war is not a war of fac- 
tions but of principles and practical ends, it is the 
very best and most fruitful of all wars. The great 
civil war of Cromwell and Charles for example, what 
was it in fact but a fighting out of all that is most 
valuable in the British Constitution ? And what was 
the result of it, briefly stated, but liberty enthroned 
and fortified by religion? And there was never a 
people more fortunate in the occasions of a civil war 
than we. 'Not one doubt is permitted us that we are 
fighting for the right and our adversaries for the 
wrong; we to save the best government of the world 
and they to destroy it. Whence it follows that, as 
God is with all right and for it by the fixed necessity 
of his virtue, we may know that we are fighting up to 
God and not away from him. And the victory when 
it comes will even be a kind of religious crowning of 
our nationality. All the atheistic jargon we have left 
behind us will be gone, and the throne of order estab- 
lished will be sanctified by moral convictions. What 
we have fought out by so many and bloody sacrifices 



REVERSES NEEDED 183 

will be hallowed by them in our feeling. Our loyalty 
will be entered into our conscience and the springs of 
our religious nature. Government will now govern 
and will be valued because it does, and the feeble plat- 
itudes we let in for a philosophy will be displaced by 
the old historic habits and convictions that have been 
the real life of our institutions from the first. 

All this, you will observe, by the simple schooling 
of our adversities and without any reform or attempt- 
ed amendment of our institutions ! Just fighting the 
war out into victory and established nationality will 
be enough. It might not be amiss at some fit time 
to insert in the preamble of our Constitution a recog- 
nition of the fact that the authority of government in 
every form is derivable and can be philosophically 
derived only from God. 'Not that any mere formal 
recognition of God or the want of it is a matter of 
essential consequence, but only that the exclusion or 
recorded denial of theories under which we have been 
so fatally demoralized could, with excellent effect, 
be incorporated in the body of the Constitution 
itself. But this is no time to agitate or put on 
foot political reforms of any kind; and I wish it 
to be distinctly observed that I am only showing 
what our adversity means, and helping you to bear 
it with a resolute heart for the good that is in it. 

Having such a cause, my friends, with such great 
hopes before us, this one almost glorious reverse that 
we have met will signify little. Adversity will be our 
strength, disappointments our arguments. I know 
not what dark days and times of unspeakable trial are 
before us, but we must be ready for anything, daunted 



184 REVERSES NEEDED 

and discouraged by nothing. Have we property, let 
it go — what is property in such a cause ? Have we 
husbands, have we sons, put the armor on them and 
the holy panoply of our prayers and send them to the 
field. Anything, that we may have a nationality and 
a government and have the true loyalty burnt into the 
hearts of our children! 

Teach us, O God, to be worthy of these great hopes ; 
make us equal to the glorious calling of thy Provi- 
dence ; be thou God of hosts in our armies ; and help 
us to establish, on eternal and right foundations, The 
Great Republic of the future ages. 



IX 

PEKSO^ALITY DEVELOPED BY 
KELIGION * 

And lie said, Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, 
but Israel : for as a prince hast thou power with God and 
with men, and hast prevailed. — Gen. xxxii. 38. 

The story of Jacob wrestling with the angel is too 
familiar to need recital. It is what may be called 
a parable acted, a case where the matter in hand is 
taught not by words but by something done. We 
have many such examples in the scriptures, as in 
Abraham's offering of Isaac, the prophet's girdle, 
and the sale commanded of the young ruler's prop- 
erty. Jacob had no manual of prayer and had prob- 
ably received no very explicit teaching concerning 
it, but he is put to the lesson to learn it by a pull of 
muscular exertion. And so beautifully is the 
wrestling with the Jehovah Angel adjusted in the 
analogies of prayer, that we can find no teaching in 
the matter of prayer more explicit or more instruc- 
tive. 

He has wrestled all night with the angel. His 
thigh is out of joint, but he will not loosen his hold. 
With a pertinacity that seems even presumptuous 

* Preached in the North Church, Hartford, January, 1854. 
185 



186 PERSONALITY DEVELOPED 

he still protests, saying, ^' I will not let thee go ex- 
cept thou bless me." So he finally prevails, and is 
honored on the spot with a new and princely name, 
in commendation of his persistency. ^' Thy name 
shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel; for as a 
prince hast thou power with God and with men, and 
hast prevailed.'' The truth or principle here dis- 
covered, and which it will be the object of my pres- 
ent discourse to illustrate is this: that, instead of 
seeking to reduce our individuality or the assertion 
of our will-force in religion, God rather designs to 
intensify it and bring it into greater power. 

It makes a very great difference, for example, in 
the matter of prayer, and so in everything else per- 
taining to religion, whether we act in the vein of 
mere surrender and self-resignation to God or in 
that of personal desire and preference, that is, from 
a will or choice of our own. Faith in one method be- 
comes little, if at all, different from an act of sub- 
mission; and indeed it is very frequently presented 
as a state of mere self-surrender to God, becoming 
in that manner a very tame and really weak sort of 
pietism. In the other method, it is but a more com- 
plete manning of the man. He is lifted into energy, 
made positive and heroic. Knowing God, he knows 
how to be more completely, boldly himself, for he 
has the confidence begotten by his acquaintance with 
God, and so is able to assert himself in a higher, 
nobler key. It results that in all matters of duty 
or obligation the will-force of the man is increased, 
not diminished. He is no mere straw, floating on 
the currents of God, but he is a man stemming all 



BY RELIGION 187 

currents where the call of duty requires. He has 
no thought of merely basking in the pious luxury 
of nothingness, but he has his objects and is always 
on the lookout for something to be done. He de- 
liberates, forms his plans, chooses his objects, and is 
only more resolute in his way than other men. His 
quiet is not quietism. It is in him to drive, but 
never to drivel ; for to many, alas ! drivelling in mere 
self -surrender is the same thing as piety. Therefore 
there is no indolent Oriental sentimentality in his 
piety, as if it were a state of absorption in God, but 
it is a girded state of personal energy and devout 
heroism. 

In this contrast you perceive my object, which is 
to conduct you if possible into the true idea and state 
of Christian power, showing by what method God 
designs to exalt the personality of his servants and 
give them power in their individual life and action, 
power with him in prayer, power with men in what 
they do for the world. 

To clear the subject or to bring it forward into a 
position where the truth may be rightly conceived, 
let us glance over some of the representations of 
scripture. How it was with Jacob is plain. In the 
first place, he gets everything ready himself, puts 
his ingenuity to the task in arranging the droves, 
and acts as if everything were to be carried by his 
own mere will and contrivance. He has his own 
point to carry, and he does not mean to fail of it. 
Then follows the suit, in which he is perfectly reso- 
lute, and we hear him protesting when the day dawns 
after wrestling all night: " I will not let thee go 



188 PERSONALITY DEVELOPED 

except thou bless me." Had it been the true idea 
of prayer that there is nothing to be done but to 
come into God's will and be resigned to it, to lose 
one's personal desires, renounce and die to all per- 
sonal preferences, how different would have been the 
scene! How different also the close! Instead of 
the new name given to signalize the wrestler and his 
power with God for all coming ages, instead of be- 
ing raised to honor as a prince, the man would have 
been signalized as a devotee, who mistook impotence 
for merit and could not imagine a God high enough 
to maintain his eminence, save as he is complimented 
by the self-annihilation of his worshippers. 

So in like manner, when Moses finds a riotous 
spirit springing up in the people because of the lack 
of suitable supplies of food, he goes to God in the 
boldness of a prince, demanding almost as a right 
some deliverance from his personal burdens. 
" Whence should I have flesh to give unto all this 
people. I am not able to bear all this people alone, 
because it is too heavy for me. And if thou deal 
thus with me, kill me, I pray thee, out of thy hand." 
On another occasion he came in also between the 
people and God's destroying anger, protesting and 
saying : " Wherefore should the Egyptians say that 
thou hast brought them out among the mountains to 
slay them? " urging boldly also God's covenant 
promise and oath to Abraham as a bar to his judg- 
ment. In the whole history of Moses, his acts and 
works and prayers, you find a man girded up to the 
intensest individuality of choice and charge and feel- 
ing, bearing as it were the whole nation of his peo- 



BY RELIGION 189 

pie on his own shoulders. The will of Pharaoh in 
rejecting God is not a whit more conspicuous than 
the personal choice and determination of Moses in 
executing the call of God. 

So in all the strong characters both of the Old 
and 'New Testament, as Samuel, David, ^N'ehemiah, 
Paul. They are men that act and plan and preach 
and pray as if they had their people and times in 
their own personal keeping and disposal. They are 
princes, all, of God, bearing their institutions, their 
temple, their whole race and nation on their shoul- 
ders. Probably the most efficient Christian by far 
that ever lived was the apostle Paul, and you see this 
in him everywhere as a distinction most of all con- 
spicuous, that while he is intensely conscious always 
of his own insufficiency he is at the same time most 
intensely personal in all his responsibilities, having 
on his soul the care of all the churches, asserting, 
or, as he himself calls it, boasting, his own spiritual 
fatherhood and dignity against the teachers that 
have sought to undermine his influence and let down 
the value of his teachings, having continual heavi- 
ness and sorrow of heart for his brethren and kins- 
men according to the flesh. It is never in his 
thought just to bow down like a bulrush and let the 
torrents of divine will roll over him, but he is out 
in the flood, standing fast, fighting it out on this line 
for the whole campaign of his ministry. His per- 
sonal desires, feelings, preferences, purposes, plans, 
responsibilities are all as conspicuous in his work as 
if he had even the care of the world on himself. Not 
that he is ignorant of all resignation or submission 



190 PERSONALITY DEVELOPED 

to God;, but that lie is perfectly resigned, perfectly 
submitted; for precisely here is the distinction be- 
tween a half resignation and one that is complete, — 
the half resignation is passive, ending there, and the 
other is a resignation to being active, personally re- 
sponsible, personally efficient for God. The former 
is the resignation of a Brahmin, the latter of an 
apostle. 

The same thing appears in regard to all that is 
said in the scriptures of our own personal charge 
and choice in the matter of prayer itself. The very 
call to prayer: " Ask and ye shall receive," is a call 
to the expression of our personal wants and prefer- 
ences, and the design is to let every disciple see that 
he has power with God. It is very true that all 
prayer rightly ordered is in a sense from the divine 
Spirit, wdio works in the secret springs of every 
man's feeling to guide him into the best desires and 
the worthiest objects, even such as are according to 
the will of God. But the Spirit does not undertake 
to get us into God's will by repression. He stirs up 
the soul, rather, to greater eagerness, so that it is 
heaving out groans of desire and prayer that pull 
on God and that draw it up into God's very mind; 
and there it is to hang, refusing to let go till its very 
groanings become an argument and reason for God's 
will. 

In the parable of the unjust judge we have the 
wrestling scene of Jacob over again. The whole in- 
tent of it is to throw the praying man upon his per- 
sonality and encourage him in adherence to his 
personal desires, even up to the point of pertinacity. 



BY RELIGION 191 

It is not the design of the parable to say that there 
can be no mistake or error on this side, for it is very 
plain that we may have selfish desires, and such as 
God can never grant. But the particular design is to 
correct another and opposite error, namely, the hav- 
ing or daring to have no desires, the being so pas- 
sively, indolently, selfishly resigned to God, that we 
are too nearly indifferent as regards our objects. 
The very greatest temptation of many Christian 
souls is that they submit and give up too easily. 
Therefore, it is a great point with God to maintain 
the will-force of our personality and he does it by 
training us even to wrestle with him. 

You may also discover how he loves to put this 
kind of honor on his servants, when he calls for 
them, as it were, to come in with their petitions and 
be intercessors before him. " And I sought for a 
man among them that should make up the hedge 
and stand in the gap before me for the land, that I 
should not destroy it, but I found none." So, 
again, he says: ^' I will be inquired of by the house 
of Israel to do it for them." In which you see that, 
so far from wishing to carry out his own will by 
itself, he invites and waits for intervening wills and 
intercessory desires, because it is possible when these 
are before him to bestow blessings which he other- 
wise could not. 

Such everywhere is the manner of scripture. It 
proposes no destruction or demolition of our per- 
sonality, but rather seeks to invigorate and embolden 
it, saying: " Let us enter the holiest with boldness." 
Nowhere does it seek to make us the mere channels 



192 PERSOIS^ALITY DEVELOPED 

of a divine agency, but always to make us agents 
ourselves in a more complete and free sense than 
before, " co-workers with Grod." " We then," says 
an apostle, " as workers together with him, beseech 
you." " For we are laborers together with God." 
The apostle has no thought, you perceive, of ceasing 
to be, as a distinct centre of choice, feeling and life ; 
but he has come, rather, to be more really, distinctly, 
gloriously and powerfully personal, more conscious- 
ly exalted and empowered by his faith in Jesus. 

It will be seen at a glance that the very problem 
of God in our training and redemption is to raise 
and perfect our personality, not to demolish it. 
Were it possible to bring all our desires, choices, 
wills into a perfect, everlasting and silent resignation 
to God, it would answer none of the purposes of God 
in our spiritual education under the gospel of Christ. 
For it is not our perfection that we may be absorbed 
as into Brahma, and lost in the abysses of his sleep; 
it is not that we may be schooled into the harmless 
dulness of an eternal inefficiency or imdesiring im- 
potence, but the word is: ^^ Remember this, and show 
yourselves men." The plan is to raise us out of 
a condition of weakness and spiritual incapacity, re- 
storing; us to love and a sound mind. It is not more 
true that a university is designed to raise the power 
and strengthen the exercise of the pupils, than that 
Christianity is designed to liberate the will, clear 
and fortify the affections, and restore the co-ordinate 
harmony of choice and reason. Instead of reduc- 
ing, levelling, demolishing, absorbing our person- 
ality, the design is to fill it out and to complete and 



BY RELIGIOI^ 193 

glorify it. Kaising us out of sin and the bondage 
of sin, which is itself a load of slavish weakness and 
depression, it sets us on a higher plane of choice and 
liberty, there to be empowered as sons of God and 
co-workers with him. 

And in just this manner it was that so many 
low-minded, uneducated fishermen, such as Peter 
and John, were raised into such eminence and power 
as apostles. It was not the annihilation of their 
personality but the associating of it with a higher 
life, even that of Christ, that wrought so great a 
change. And so it was with Paul. He was not 
a very remarkable man before his conversion. It 
was in his conversion that his glorious personality 
was liberated from its weakness and endued with 
true power. He had will enough before, but it 
was such will as passion instigates, and passion is 
weakness. He was violent, and violence is weak- 
ness. God therefore will have vehemence but not 
violence, and vehemence is will-force itself. And 
this it is which the prophet represents when he 
declares in God's name: '^Behold, I will make 
thee a new, sharp threshing instrument, having 
teeth; thou shalt thresh the mountains and beat 
them small and shalt make the hills as chaff.'' How 
many of these tremendous threshing instruments, 
such as Moses and Paul and Luther and Cromwell, 
has God raised up to thresh down the mountains of 
perverse hindrance and make them chaff before his 
cause! A genuine faith has never any other kind 
of effect. It sharpens the personality, and tunes it 
to a higher key. And God will have it so. To 



194 PERSONALITY DEVELOPED 

make an eleventh chapter of Hebrews as long as the 
world's history is the very object of his training, 
that he may open the shining roll and say: ''Who 
through faith subdued kingdoms, wrought righteous- 
ness, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, 
quenched the violence of fire, out of weakness were 
made strong, waxed valiant in fight, turned to flight 
the armies of the aliens.'' These are the princes, or 
Israels, that have power with God and with men and 
so prevail, heroes of the faith whom God is raising 
up into a glorious and transcendent personality, to 
make them kings and priests unto God, that they 
may reign forever. 

But, you may object, we are required to be little 
children, to put on meekness and suppress the pas- 
sions that flame up out of our individual feeling and 
the instigations of our evil will; and what is this 
but to make a surrender of our force and cease in so 
far from all pertinacity? Was then Christ, I would 
ask, less completely a person, less distinct, less emi- 
nent in the grandeur of his personal attitude, that 
he consented to bear his enemies and be a lamb be- 
fore his persecutors? Where else does he rise to a 
more truly incomprehensible greatness, becoming a 
personality more transcendently divine, a will more 
resistless, than here? 

But we are placed, it will be said, under conditions 
of repression and required to let '' every thought be 
brought into captivity to the obedience of Christ." 
Even so, for just there we are raised into the very 
highest force of our personality. Until then what 
we call our life is unregulated force, which in re- 



BY RELIGION 195 

ligion, as in doings with nature, is but another name 
for all defeat and impotence. But when every 
thought of our soul is brought into the harmony of 
Christ, which is the harmony of thought and impulse 
with all order and truth and reason, then it becomes 
a regulated force, and the personality, almost 
wrecked under the discords and disorders of sin, is 
restored to its native energy, to be a prince having 
power with God and with men. Real power is but 
another name for regulated power. 

Again, the doctrine of faith is sometimes held as 
being only a doctrine of resignation to God, and he 
is supposed to have the most faith who can be still- 
est, least in exercise, most completely hushed in 
desire and care under the will of God. But there 
is no such will of God as wants or will accept any 
such faith. It is a mock faith, not a true. The 
true faith believes a great deal more. Instead of 
lying down before God as a clod to be disposed of by 
him, it believes that God will reason with it, and 
that he calls it to come and reason with him; that 
God will give heed to its desires, suffer its importu- 
nities, justify it in the pursuit of its chosen ends and 
objects, come over to it in favor, as the angel to 
Jacob, and cover it with princely honors. This is 
faith, and nothing less can be. It believes that God 
will so far acknowledge its desires, arguments, and 
prayers as to give it power even with himself. 

I have a most particular satisfaction in the con- 
clusion to which these thoughts bring us, viz., to 
the fact that no man is required, in coming to Christ, 
to make any sacrifice that will at all diminish or in- 



196 PERSONALITY DEVELOPED 

fringe on the distinctive will-force of his personal- 
ity. He will be just so much more of a man as he 
is more of a Christian. His unregulated force, be- 
coming regulated force, will be weakness raised into 
power. His will, which we say in one view is now 
all-dominant, will yet be manifold stronger than it 
is now. His command of himself will be greater, 
his thoughts higher, his vision clearer, his affections 
broader and more full, and there will be a certain 
divine inspiration in him that will lift him into a 
higher range of consciousness, and empower him for 
greater works and undertakings. And here in great 
part is the joy of a Christian life. It is the sense of 
personal enlargement found in a love that compre- 
hends the world. He who has received this love is 
surprised at the breadth revealed in his nature. He 
thought, looking on the life of religion from with- 
out, that it would very nearly be the end of him to 
become a Christian, that after renouncing so much 
there would be nothing left but a few slender 
vestiges of existence. But he finds, instead, that 
in the loss of himself he has found himself, and hag 
now in fact but just begun to be. O, this new sense 
of freedom! this living life! this fulness! this con- 
fidence of power! Do not think, my friends, that 
when we call you to Christ we call you away from 
existence, to be nothing and cease. If you ever find 
him, you will make a very different discovery from 
that. Your greatest wonder and surprise will be 
that God has been able to make so much out of a 
spirit so shrivelled and dulled by the dryness, the 
littleness and meanness of a selfish life. 



BY RELIGION 197 

Hence it is the feeling of all true saints of God 
that they have a princely rank, that God is not jeal- 
ous of power in his people. He stirs them up to 
pertinacity. He exasperates their desires. He 
groans in their compassions. He lets them come 
and wrestle that they may be strong. He calls them 
to " stand in the gap '' as intercessors before him; 
and when they prevail, he crowns them as belonging 
to his own divine nobility. And he saith: " Thy 
name shall be called no more Jacob but Israel, for 
as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, 
and hast prevailed.'' 

Observe, too, that he speaks not only of power 
with him, but of power with men; for the design is 
to give us power in every direction, with God as with 
men, with men as with God. That is, he will have 
us take upon us points to be carried with our fellow- 
men, just as we do points to be carried with him. 
And he will have us say to them, as to him: ^^ I will 
not let you go." As you have desires to be urged in 
prayer, so you will have objects, charges, responsi- 
bilities, works, and you will adhere also to these 
under the same conditions as you do to your prayers. 
Slight hindrances will not discourage you. Opposi- 
tion or seeming defeat will not be taken as an excuse 
from your work; but you will follow it and adhere 
to it and press it onward till it is carried. For if 
you go into any such engagement under the leading 
of God's spirit, you will be endued with power for 
it. A power will be developed in you, the power 
heretofore unknown of your own mysterious per- 
sonality. All things are possible to one who is 



198 PERSONALITY DEVELOPED 

girded in this manner by the divine Spirit and his 
call. 

And here is the new type of character that is 
wanted in our day. For this the world is waiting, 
and for this also God, as the king and redeemer of 
the world. Before the great day of Christ shall 
come there must be a new development of the Chris- 
tian life. And it will be when all the pietistic, arti- 
ficial, dogmatically enfeebled and emasculated forms 
of piety give place to the heroic life of faith and a 
Christian personality, girded by the Spirit. This, in 
fact, is the very coming of the Lord. Come, Lord 
Jesus, come quickly! 



THE FIKETE DEMAl^DS THE mFmiTE * 

Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy loving- 
kindness ; according unto the multitude of thy tender 
mercies blot out my transgressions. — Psalm li. 1. 

In his wail of penitence the guilty man does not 
ask, we perceive, for mercy according to his want, 
or according to the measures of his personal guilti- 
ness; but the remarkable thing is that he finds a 
relief in wording his petition more freely, asking for 
mercy even according to God's own measures. 
Conscious of guilt, borne down as it were under 
heavy loads of transgression, it comforts him to 
measure his prayer by God's mercy itself. " Have 
mercy upon me, O God, according to thy loving- 
kindness; according unto the multitude of thy tender 
mercies blot out my transgressions." And it is re- 
markable how very frequently this preposition 
" according to,^^ as a word of ratio and as referring 
to the contents and measures of God, is used in the 
same manner when speaking of and asking for his 
gifts. ^^ Let the sighing of the prisoner come be- 
fore thee, according to the greatness of thy power 
preserve thou those that are ready to die." " Judge 
me, O Lord, according to thy righteousness." " In 
* Preached in the North Church, Hartford, August, 1857. 
199 



200 THE FINITE 

■whom we have redemption according to the riches 
of his grace.'^ " But my God shall supply all your 
need according to his riches in glory by Christ 
Jesus." '' Strengthened with all might according to 
his glorious power." " According to the power that 
worketh in us." ^' Striving according to his work- 
ing that worketh in me mightily." 

;N'ow in all these forms of expression and a multi- 
tude of others that correspond, we are to see how 
fondly the mind reverts to God's widest, most im- 
measurable attributes and perfections. It loves to 
magnify its blessings by saying, '^ according to " 
some attribute of greatness in God — his power, his 
mighty working, his purposes, the riches of his 
grace, his righteousness, his great love, the multitude 
of his tender mercies — resting implicitly on God's 
immeasurable perfections and petitioning for gifts, 
forgivenesses, and new-creating mercies that are in 
the scale of those perfections, or according to their 
quantities in him. Indeed, nothing can be said of 
Christianity as a work of God so nearly adequate as 
to call it a salvation according to God's own good- 
ness; and therefore it is that a ruined world comes to 
it so gladly and with so great confidence. It is grace 
enough. It measures the depths of God. We are 
not obliged to guess whether it is according to our 
sin; enough that it is according to the great love 
wherewith he loved us. We propose it, then, as a 
great and welcome truth 

That God is not too much hecause he is infinite; 
that being finite we cannot the better spare some part 
of God^s perfections^ but even want them the more; 



DEMANDS THE INFINITE 201 

iJiat there is nothing in God that even the had mind 
could willingly consent to lose. 

There seems, at first view, to be a kind of logical 
impossibility in the notion that a finite being can 
apprehend or want or in any way receive a being 
infinite. How can a finite subject really want that 
which is infinite for its object and supply? But this 
kind of argument depends on following too implic- 
itly merely physical analogies. It is very true that no 
finite thing can contain infinite quantities, no pitcher 
hold the sea; but when you come to souls, their 
finiteness is itself a want of the infinite; it is weak- 
ness wanting power, ignorance wanting insight and 
wisdom, moral infirmity wanting to be anchored in 
the peace and ever-during stability of God, muta- 
bility wanting a base in the immutable, time a foot- 
ing of eternity. It lies in the very nature of a soul 
taken as a finite creature that it is and is to be com- 
pleted in the infinite. Otherwise it is a nature in- 
complete, for all its natural longings as a finite being 
reach after and demand what is infinite, — power, 
certainty, counsel, immutability, eternity, and the 
kingdom, in some sense, of the universe. We are 
not therefore to imagine that because we are finite 
and God infinite there must of course be an over- 
plus in God. We want the infinite in him just be- 
cause we are finite, that we too may be complete 
with him, that we may dominate and reign with him. 
There is nothing in him that we do not want, no 
excess, no quantities or gifts of perfection that we 
can spare. 

It is very true that we do sometimes suffer a feel- 



202 THE FINITE 

ing of oppression from the contemplation of infinite 
realities. We send our tlioiiglits up through the 
glittering worlds of a starry night, for example; we 
try to imagine their numbers, weights, distances, 
and above all where the great sea-world they float 
in has its shore. We are lost, sunk to nothingness, 
crushed into pain by these contemplations of the in- 
finite, and we begin to think, it may be, that exist- 
ence would be less oppressive if there were no in- 
finite. And as it is with the worlds, so it is with 
the Creator of worlds, for we suffer the same im- 
pression from the infinity of God as from the infinity 
of his works. What are we before such magni- 
tudes, what can we do Avith them, what place hold 
among them? And yet, if we could somehow touch 
or pierce in thought to some last boimdary, whether 
of God's magnitudes or those of his works, how 
great the oppression we should suffer in the discov- 
ery that there is nothing infinite! That maze 
we were in, that tremor we felt and reeled under 
is gone; and now we have it for a worse be- 
cause a meaner pain that nothing is but what is 
finite, that the worlds are but motes, sparks, fog- 
blinks, and that trivialities are all there is of being 
in the universe. We have only to raise a concep- 
tion like this to convince ourselves how truly and 
inevitably we, as finite beings, want the infinite. If 
the universe were less, if it had a shore, we could 
not be satisfied. If space had a limit, we should 
straightway look beyond it and break through the 
unendurable confines. If God were less than infi- 
nite, we could not even comfort our thought in him. 



DEMANDS THE INFINITE 203 

So true is it after all that we do demand and do 
really appropriate infinite being. Without a con- 
scious and fixed relation to infinite being, our exist- 
ence even is no better than bafiled instinct. We 
want a salvation that is according to God and could 
rest in no other — one in which the whole Deity is 
shown, God in Christ reconciling the world, Christ 
himself testifying, " All power is given unto me in 
heaven and in earth." 

A single word is introduced in the New Testa- 
ment, which in its various uses covers the truth that 
the all of God and God's perfections is our want, and 
that this we do receive or have communicated. I 
mean the word fulness [pleroma]. The church is 
extolled as having this fulness of God, appropriated 
and embodied in itself, — '^ Which is his body, the 
fulness of him that filleth all in all." Out of this 
fulness all believers are conceived to get their sup- 
ply, — '' And of his fulness have all we received, 
grace for grace." " That ye may be able to com- 
prehend with all saints what is the breadth and 
length and depth and height, and to know the love 
of Christ that passeth knowledge, that ye might be 
filled with all the fulness of God." Here it is the 
joy, the praise of all good minds that God's pleroma, 
the all-containing volume of his personal majesty, is 
participated, rested in, acceptable to and accepted by 
them that love him. 

Do we then propose to submit, do we dare submit 
such a question as this to the judgments and convic- 
tion of mankind, leaving it to them to say whether 
they can spare or can tolerate the diminution of any 



204: THE FINITE 

one of God's attributes or perfections? We do. 
We know the deep revulsion from God there is in 
the soul of every guilty being. God is thought of 
with dread, and his interference with the liberty of 
sin provokes in the guilty soul a real enmity. The 
bad heart even rages against him, and the tongue 
breaks loose in unrestrained accusations. And yet 
I will go even to such and make the appeal, asking 
them to say what one of God's infinite attributes they 
will spare. 

God is omnipotent. Is that too much? Suppose 
that his power were known to fall short in some 
point and to be inferior possibly to some other ad- 
verse power. What concern would they feel, in 
common with us all ! In what trepidation should we 
all live lest the fatal juncture may be close at hand 
where the power of God is to fall, to succumb ! 'No, 
we want all power to be with him. Even if we are 
not with him ourselves, but against him, it would 
still be a shocking, an insupportable thought that 
God, the Creator and Governor of all things, is liable 
at some time to be overpowered and worsted. We 
want a God whose power is infinite and reliable; 
nay, we want ourselves to rest on such a being, and 
feel the eternal rock under us, thus and there to 
sing: ''Power belongeth unto God." "Thine, O 
Lord, is the greatness and the power and the glory 
and the victory and the majesty, for all that is in 
the heaven and the earth is thine, thine is the king- 
dom, O Lord, and thou rulest over all." 

God is omnipresent. Could we consent, even the 
worst of us, to have it otherwise? What horror 



DEMANDS THE mFINITE 205 

would it give us to imagine the possibility that we 
are going into places where God is not! Indeed, if 
we only knew that God were absent from some other 
world, in some outskirt of the universe, it would 
trouble us, for nothing could assure us that there 
would not be disorder there, wants unsupplied, af- 
flictions, crying after an absent God. 

God is omniscient, understanding, looking into, 
inspecting all things, even the thoughts of all cre- 
ated minds. How many of us shrink from this 
truth! To imagine that God is by us, looking on 
all our most secret and studiously concealed acts, 
looking in fact directly into our bare heart, inspect- 
ing all its motions, into our conscience to read its 
eternal registers, into our inmost will to see what 
future is in it and preparing to come out of it, — 
this, we think, in our guiltiness, is more than we can 
endure without pain — it gives us a cold shudder of 
feeling when we think of it. Yes, but how much 
colder the shudder to think otherwise, to think, for 
example, that we have enemies who are brewing 
secret mischiefs against us, robbery, perjury, mur- 
der, and not even God knows it; that vast combina- 
tions and undercurrents of thought are moving in 
the world's bosom and bearing us on to a state of 
possible wreck, which he cannot see or inspect. Yes, 
and it is a comfort, after all how great, that our God 
knows us perfectly, watches the bad causes at work 
in us, the secret affinities and subtle misdoing pre- 
paring in our heart, that he has looked on all our 
guilty past and sees all the marks our sin has made 
on us, how they were made and when, and what is 



206 THE FINITE 

needed to restore and heal us. O, how little do we 
understand ourselves and how blessed after all is it, 
with all that is most humbling in the fact, that there 
is one being, a friendly and a just, who knows us 
perfectly! The omniscient God! Piercing, fear- 
ful is the thought! And yet, to have a God not 
omniscient, how uncomfortable, unsatisfying, dread- 
ful, even to the guiltiest mind! 

God is eternal, existing from eternity in the past, 
to exist and by existence fill the eternity of the 
future. Because we cannot take in these eternities 
ourselves or comprehend them, it does not follow 
that we can spare a friend that does. We have, 
blessed be his name_, such a being, one who knows 
all things in their origin, all things in their end, 
comprehends eternal history in his person, and so 
by uniting us to himself connects us legitimately 
with all that is past and all that is future, — thus to 
say, " From everlasting to everlasting thou art God," 
and in that confidence to rest. 

God is unchangeable. If he were changeable, or 
only somewhat changeable, how could we trust him ? 
^ow, when all things rush in tides of mutation by 
us, when we and our laws and examples and opin- 
ions vary, veer and flit as birds of the air, what can 
it be but a most joyful and trustful fact that God 
changes not, that " with him is no variableness, nei- 
ther shadow of turning." On this fact rests the or- 
der of the universe. If God were changeable, prin- 
ciples would be overturned, premises falsified, 
scientific laws discontinued and succeeded by others, 
and even virtues themselves could have no fixed 



DEMANDS THE INFINITE 207 

standard, no reward. We can find no comfort in 
life, not even for an hour, save as we believe that 
we are living under a God who is unchangeable. 

God is pure — infinite purity. There is no stain 
upon his beauty. 'No afiinity with evil lurks in his 
nature. Wrath, abhorrence, loathing are the figures 
that describe his feeling toward wrong and evil. ^' He 
is of purer eyes than to behold evil, and cannot look 
upon iniquity. Nothing that defileth or maketh a 
lie can come to his seat or stand before him.'' A 
very appalling thought to a bad mind, it must be con- 
fessed! But how much more appalling it would be 
if he were not thus pure, if he could wink at wrong 
or suffer any the least affinity with it! The worst 
and even basest soul, if only reason is left, recoils 
with terror insufferable from a God not pure. For 
if there be stains on the throne, what shall assure 
that there will be no injustice in the laws, no par- 
tiality in their administration, no connivance with 
wrongs, no wrongs everlastingly unavenged? Un- 
der a God not pure confidence vanishes, and the 
world is turned into a hell. And on the other hand, 
how high, how glorious is the attraction of the 
infinite purity, the simplicity, the unstained excel- 
lence, the radiance, the spotless beauty of the 
purity of God! Souls stained by sin are drawn by 
it, and blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall 
see it. 

God, again, is sovereign. By which we under- 
stand that he governs the world and governs by a 
plan which is to him intelligible and eternal. He 
has eternal purposes, extending to and comprehend- 



208 THE FINITE 

ing all events, so that he rules by system, knows the 
end from the beginning, and sees all events fall into 
their places, never disappointed, never taken by sur- 
prise. How he does this without being the author 
of evil is not here the question, though in that there 
is really no difficulty whatever. But the question is 
whether we can part with this attribute of sover- 
eignty. Is there anything to apprehend from the 
sovereignty of eternal goodness? And if goodness 
were not sovereign, ruled without a plan, planned 
without purposes or ends, who could be at ease un- 
der it? A God who does not know what is coming 
to pass, a God taken by surprise, — would such a God 
be more acceptable to us? And when dark times 
appear, when the wicked triumph, when law is dis- 
solved, when justice flies and cruelty erects her 
bloody throne, what can support us but the confi- 
dence of a sovereign God, one who governs under- 
standingly, able to make the wrath praise him and 
the remainder of wrath to restrain? However un- 
welcome, then, or terrible to a guilty mind the sov- 
ereignty of God, we cannot wish that he were not 
sovereign, or less perfectly and intelligently sover- 
eign. As our providential governor, too, we need 
one who can rule and watch and minister in the gen- 
eral disorder of causes; one who can overturn, break 
up, revolutionize, expurgate, medicate, and by such 
working set on the world's history; a being who can 
rule men when- nature and her causes cannot, dom- 
inating in all changes and laws and wars and insti- 
tutions, caring for the weak, avenging the poor and 
exalting them that are of low degree. It is a great 



DEMANDS THE INFINITE 209 

work, a deep mystery, this rule of Providence; but 
we want it, even the worst of us, and want as much 
a God who is equal to it. 

God is just. And is he not for that reason a God 
necessarily unwelcome to any and every wrong-doer? 
Undoubtedly he is. How can any sinner stand be- 
fore a God of infinite, unbending, unalterable 
justice? And yet he can do even that better than 
he can stand before a God unjust. What so dread- 
ful to thought as the having at the head of the uni- 
verse a being who is not just, a partial, capricious, 
inexact and loose being, whose decisions are never 
sure to touch the merits of questions, and who may 
even take a pleasure in doing what he knows to be 
unjust. Is there any sinner of mankind, after all, 
who would prefer God without his justice? Any 
who would wish him to be less than infinitely just? 
God is the Judge of the world, and certainly it wants 
a judge. Suppose it were known to you that this 
great world of wrong, with its frauds, oppressions, 
cruelties, treacheries and lies, were to be eternally 
what it is now; to roll on forever in the smoke of 
wrong, never to be cleared up, never to have its 
great account liquidated. Would that comfort you? 
How much better to have a reckoning day, a settle- 
ment that will display eternal justice ruling at the 
helm and turning all things rightly in the end ! 

He is our Creator and the creator of the universal 
worlds. We want him to be such. Without him 
and apart from him these worlds are a dull pasture, 
and all the seemings of intelligence are without 
meaning or dignity. We want a world's creator, to 



210 THE FINITE 

see his footsteps in the world, to distinguish his au- 
thorship and take him as the date of all beginning. 

God is our Redeemer also, and in order to this 
he must be a God who has power over nature, power 
to roll back its penal causes, tear us out of its bond- 
age and cure the wounds of our sin by a healing of 
nature itself. If the resources of God, his power, 
love, beauty, feeling, will, were less than they are, 
we could not be redeemed from sin. If, then, we 
cling to our sin, if we take it even as a disturbance 
to be called away from it, should we like it better 
if we could not get away? Do we want a God such 
as cannot help us out of our sin or heal the scars 
it has made? The worst man living would start in 
horror from himself if he knew that he must eter- 
nally be what he is.* 

And thus we find that we need everything " ac- 
cording to '' God, all his perfections, all his powers, 
all his majestic attributes, all that he creates, pur- 
poses, prepares and ministers. What a fact, then, 
is it that such a being exists! To be able by our 
thought to lay hold of such a being and confidently 
to think that he is, to have one's heart rested on him, 
to have his word and to know him by the immediate 
knowledge of love, — how does it change the world! 

* To those familiar with Dr. Bushnell's habits of thought and 
feeling it must seem a little singular that in this study of the 
attributes of God only a passing allusion is made to that of Infinite 
Love. Even for the sake of the general argument something more 
complete is desirable upon this head. If the reader will refer to a 
sermon entitled "Loving God is but Letting God Love Us," in the 
volume of " Sermons on Living Subjects," pp. 37-54, he will find 
passages of insight and beauty which might well be transplanted 
here. Compare also with the extracts from a sermon on th§ 
" JEternity of Love " in this volume, pp. 240-245. 



DEMANDS THE INFINITE 211 

How different is a world with perfection in it, even 
a perfect God, from a world where he is not, or 
where he is known only by diminished and corrupt 
conceptions. Nor is such a being any the less re- 
lated to us in that he is infinite. If it steals upon 
us when we are sounding in this deep that such a 
being is one in whom we have no part, how speedily 
do we find that we want everything in him, and not 
least his infinity itself; without which and apart 
from which we are essentially and eternally incom- 
plete; with which and by our rest therein we find 
all our finite faculties set in a range of divinity and 
begin ourselves to reign. His omniscience, omni- 
presence, omnipotence, his eternity, truth, love, un- 
changeableness, everything that pertains to his in- 
finity, all his perfections, we are to appropriate and 
in their power to be what in ourselves we are not; 
to have the confidence, rest in the assurance, abide 
in the sovereignty of him we are made to partake. 
In this view, what a gift is our finite capacity, and 
to this what a gift is God, and between it and him 
how sublime the inherent original relation! Noth- 
ing in him can we spare, all that his eternity includes 
is food to us. According to his skill, according to 
his riches, according to his justice, according to his 
love and goodness and mercy, and according to his 
great glory and blessedness, — this is the scale of 
good after which our wants and longings reach, and 
in this we live, always beholding the face of our 
Father. True, we are lost, and that how often in 
these magnitudes. We look up into the heavens 
and climb up thoughtfully into their order, drink 



212 THE FINITE 

their brightness and fly to their uttermost spaces 
looking for some end, and our breath stops in us, 
we die as it were into the gulf we have sounded: 
but this gulf is God, and how good and blessed a 
thing it is to be lost in him! And therefore do we 
want all these, the sun, the seven stars and Orion, 
all the shining, sparkling world-dust sprinkled in the 
belting of the earth's girdle, — everything that sig- 
nifies and shows us God, everything that bears the 
stamp of his majesty. 

How great a crime, then, is it not to love God! 
The state of sin, we are told, is a state of enmity 
with God. Sin may even be defijied as a quarrel 
with God's perfections. O how often, how con- 
sciously, how bitterly have you felt it. You start 
in your guiltiness from almost every one of God's at- 
tributes, they disturb you, they oppress you, and 
sometimes you even wrangle with them in captious 
and accusing words. Yet there is not one closest 
and most piercing attribute of purity, love, justice, 
sovereignty, power, omniscience, that you can think 
of as reduced or made ambiguous without a secret 
chill of horror and dread. This God whom you re- 
pel is in every most appalling perfection just the 
God you want. Your mind approves and demands 
him, your sense of beauty cleaves to him, your senti- 
ments and affections throng after him in hunger, and 
without him, as you are consciously certain, your sin 
is death. And yet you love him not, a guilty dread 
separates you from him, and he is even the more 
unwelcome to you because he is perfect. O, the 
damning perversity of such a state! If it be diffi- 



DEMANDS THE INFINITE 213 

cult to fathom God's immensity, how much more 
difficult is it to understand and adequately fathom 
yourself, the depths of your sin, the unreason of it, 
its scorn of all that is most perfect, its rejection of 
all that is most approved, the bitter pains it cher- 
ishes, the scathing shame of its pride, the dryness of 
its thirst and the tenacity with which it clings to 
what brings only loathing. This dread mystery of sin 
does sometimes get a voice in your bosom and writhe 
in bitter wailing of discovery. Can God pardon? 
Can he restore and heal such malady? Go to him 
and ask it of him. If looking into yourself you de- 
spair, if it seems impossible that so great madness 
can be cured, look away from yourself to God. 
Make your appeal to him, saying hopefully: ^' Have 
mercy upon me, O God, according to thy loving- 
kindness ; according unto the multitude of thy tender 
mercies blot out my transgressions." 



XI 

GOD PKEPAEING THE STATE OF GLOKY * 

That in the ages to come he might show the exceeding 
riches of his grace in his kindness toward us through 
Christ Jesus. — Eph. ii. 7. 

Our apostle is here giving the motive or end, you 
perceive, by which God is actuated in something pre- 
viously set forth, namely: the plan of redemption 
provided in Christ, and especially the grace of salva- 
tion revealed in those who believe. He had been 
discoursing on this wise: ^' But God, who is rich in 
mercy, for his great love wherewith he loved us, even 
when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us to- 
gether with Christ (by grace are ye saved) and hath 
raised us up together and made us sit together in 
heavenly places in Christ Jesus." Having thus 
brought into view the love of God to us personally, 
that love which is realized and shed abroad as a 
quickening power in us, he then glances at a motive 
still more general and comprehensive, reaching after 
ends that lie beyond us and our particular personal 
welfare, the demonstration to be made of his own 
character in future ages and conditions of being. 
" That in the ages to come he might show the ex- 
ceeding riches of his grace in his kindness toward 
us through Christ Jesus.'' 

* Preached in the North Church, Hartford, January, 1852. 
314 



THE STATE OF GLORY 216 

"We discover accordingly in these words the very 
important and sublime truth that God is not only 
seeking after us out of love to us in the grace and 
gospel of his Son, but that he is preparing also re- 
sults which reach beyond us, the illustration to be 
made of his own transcendent wisdom and goodness 
before other beings and in future ages of time. God 
is love in everything, actuated by love in all the 
ends and councils of his administration. What he 
does for us is done proximately from a motive of 
love to us, even as we read in the connection of the 
text " for his great love wherewith he loved us," 
"in his kindness toward us;" but in a more ulterior 
view he has respect also to the benefit through us 
of other ages and worlds, even his whole spiritual 
kingdom, which he also loves as truly as he loves 
us, and which he proposes also to bless by the demon- 
stration he makes of his own character and govern- 
ment through us, and the exceeding riches of his 
grace in us. 

It is this ulterior view or motive in God's plan of 
proceeding to which I propose to invite your atten- 
tion at the present time. 

You will make due account of the great and com- 
monly accepted principle that God does and should 
do everything for his own glory, — not to make an 
ostentation of himself, as these words are commonly 
understood by such as do not stay to find their mean- 
ing, not ambitiously, not as seeking his own repute 
for his own sake. God is actuated by no such low 
infirmities ; but there is another nobler sense in which 
we say and truly that he does everything for his own 



216 eOD PREPARING 

glory, that is for the connminication of himself to 
other roinds. Glory is the light or radiance by 
which an object shines abroad and through which it 
reveals or discovers itself. Therefore as the knowl- 
edge of God, his being, his wisdom, his love and 
beauty are the necessary light and joy of all created 
minds, it is only kindness, condescension, disinter- 
ested goodness in God so to plan his work of crea- 
tion, providence and spiritual government as will 
most effectually and adequately communicate him- 
self, — that is, for his own glory to manifest and 
declare himself to created minds. Even as the Psalm- 
ist says : " The heavens declare his glory, the firma- 
ment showeth his handiwork; day unto day utter eth 
speech, night unto night showeth forth knowledge.'^ 
Everything that God does is in this view declarative. 
The world itself is made to reveal and communicate 
what may be thus communicated of the existence 
and wisdom and power and beauty of God, not for 
his sake, but because it is the first interest of all cre- 
ated minds to know God. Mere benevolence, there- 
fore, rationally directed, requires him to have it as 
the highest motive and final aim of his works to 
glorify or communicate himself or, what is the same, 
to set himself before the apprehension of his creat- 
ures in the true radiance and divine worth of his 
infinite and essentially glorious character. Eor you 
will observe that words communicate nothing of God 
apart from what he does, and it is only the doings, 
ways, acts, impressions made of God through ex- 
pression that give words a meaning. If God had 
done nothing he would to us be nothing. And there 



THE STATE OF GLORY 217 

is no created mind in the universe that gets any 
knowledge of him apart from what he does. Hence 
it is the great point of wisdom and goodness and con- 
descension in his plans to be always doing what will 
express or glorify himself, that the earth may be 
full of his glory, " that the glory of the Lord may 
be revealed and that all flesh may see it '' ; sending 
Christ to be the brightness of his glory in the world, 
shining into our hearts to give the light of the knowl- 
edge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, 
and in all this having ultimate reference also to a 
general communication of himself to the created 
minds of his universal kingdom. And thus comes 
out the meaning of my text in its reference to the 
future conditions of being, that in the ages to come 
he might show the exceeding riches of his grace, in 
his kindness toward us through Jesus Christ. 

Consider next the very certain fact that there is 
a great deal more to be seen of God in the work 
of Christ than we at present see, that also which 
every good mind will rejoice to receive, that which 
God in the mere sense of its value to created intelli- 
gences ought as fully as possible to communicate. 
How little able are we at present to fathom and ex- 
haust the great mystery of godliness in Jesus Christ ! 
Scarcely do we know as yet the alphabet of this great 
volume of God. We cannot even conceive, in any 
but the faintest measure, the transcendent mystery 
of our own personal experience and history as re- 
lated to the divine working in us, and the quicken- 
ing grace of Jesus and his cross in the mysterious 
union of faith by which he lives and walks in us. 



218 GOD PREPARING 

Besides, we are not yet arrived at the point where 
we can see the import of Christianity as a regener- 
ative power. How slender, for instance, were the 
conceptions of Christ which occupied those two dis- 
ciples who were walking into the country after his 
crucifixion, downcast and sad. Peter knew a great 
deal more of what it meant and of the greatness of 
God's love in it after he had seen its power on the 
day of Pentecost, and yet so little that he could not 
even imagine it as a gift to the Gentiles or the whole 
world, until the miracle of the sheet, and the Gentile 
churches . gathered in the Gentile cities of the world, 
had fully opened his eyes. We hold a place still 
farther down the current of time by eighteen centu- 
ries, and we have seen what God is meaning and 
doing in the gospel of his Son by eighteen centuries 
of history. We have seen idolatrous kingdoms fall 
before the gospel. We have seen Christianity oper- 
ating as a leaven upon the mind and character of 
the world, conquering unbelief and persecution, out- 
living the abuses and mistakes of its friends, re- 
generating piety, quickening intelligence, unfolding 
new conditions of public order and liberty and be- 
coming the strongest power of the world, a visibly 
divine power which cannot die, but must reign till 
it has brought all things under its dominion. And 
yet we are not at the point to understand it, because 
too close to the fountain or birth-time to conceive 
at all what it means, or how much it can impart of 
God to the human state, how much it mil impart 
when it becomes the tabernacle of God with men, 
the 'New Jerusalem let down from God out of heaven 



THE STATE OF GLORY 219 

to be the city of his glory in the world. We can- 
not tell how many millions of ages it is to work upon 
our fallen race or what it will finally do. Probably 
it never can be known by the dwellers in the flesh 
in any age how much it contains and communicates 
and works of God. We do not even adequately 
know what the communication of God thus to a sin- 
gle soul imports, and cannot till that soul is glorified 
before us, — how great the transformation, how high 
it is raised, how great in character and joy and 
power it may be. The real meaning and glory of 
Christ's work therefore cannot be known in this 
world, however long it may continue and however 
completely it may regenerate the future condition 
of the world. It is only in the world of the glorified 
and the ages to come that any fit gauge of it or of 
God's riches in it can be attained to, and even there 
the power and greatness of God's love and the ex- 
ceeding riches of his grace in it will be shining with 
new lustre and discovering or discerning new glory, 
even forever. ISTow if it may be so, and if God can 
thus show to the universe more of himself through 
what he does in us, and communicate to their ever- 
lasting joy and blessing more of himself, what but 
goodness is it in him to plan for such a result? In 
so doing he only plans to ennoble the created minds 
of his kingdom, to enlarge the understanding, enrich 
the wisdom, exalt the feeling and fill the conscious- 
ness with a more complete and blessed participation 
of himself, which is exactly the import of my text 
and the truth I am presenting under it. 

Consider now the fact that this world is immedi- 



220 G^OD PREPARING 

ately connected with the unseen into which we are 
passing, and thus probably with all the good minds 
of all worlds^ so that what has been revealed or ex- 
perienced of Grod's love through Christ and his work 
may accrue to the common benefit and augment the 
revelation of God in them all. God's universe of 
mind, like that of matter, is one, a complete whole, 
in which all the parts have distinct offices and com- 
municate distinct manifestations of his glory. He 
manages them all by various methods, doubtless for 
this object, gives them all a peculiar and distinct 
experience, and then the parts with all their partial, 
variously shaded experiences constitute a complete 
whole in their contributions. Taken all together in 
this manner they produce knowledges that represent 
his infinite worth and greatness, the true glory, the 
most adequate possible communication or revelation 
of God. Flowing together socially, as saints from 
all worlds, they bring contributions to each other, 
supply and feed each other, pouring out the glory 
thus of God into each other's bosoms, and so they 
enter on a state which has its principal joy and dig- 
nity in the fuller, and eternally fuller, discovery of 
God. God is showing thus to the ages to come the 
exceeding riches of his grace, in what all individuals 
and worlds have experienced of him. In this man- 
ner the universe of spiritual being yields a perfect 
system of divine truth or knowledge, in which all 
the parts are contributors to the glorious whole, and 
so it is that God purposes to communicate the ex- 
ceeding riches of his goodness and beauty; for, 
though it is proper in the way of contrast with our 



THE STATE OF GLORY 221 

present obscure state to speak of seeing God as he 
is, we are not to understand a sensual ocular be- 
holding in the future state^ but a clearness and ful- 
ness and an eternally unfolding radiance that will 
be more than a seeing of God, though it be a dis- 
cerning made through what he has done, what he 
has imparted of himself, and now imparts in the 
transfigured brightness of all created minds. In 
this manner, I conceive, God proposes to make the 
great spiritual kingdom he gathers happy, and fill 
up their sublime experiences of joy for evermore. 
Their joy will be the joy they have in the shining 
of God's glory, or the communication to them of 
God, and therefore it is that he prepares, in all his 
works of creation, government and redemption to 
unfold his glory. The worlds will all bring in their 
contributions, the providences will all open their 
treasures, the histories public and private will be 
brought in, the mysteries that were hid revealed; 
and the Son of God, the eternal Word of the Father, 
the Counsellor and Redeemer, will be the uni- 
versally recognized medium and express image of 
the Father, the brightness of his glory to the gen- 
eral mind of the creation, as to us. For the light of 
the divinity shines only through and by him, 
whether it be in the creation or the cross, everything 
that is done or seen being the divine counsel, char- 
acter and glory manifested through him. " For by 
him were all things created that are in heaven and 
that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they 
be thrones or dominions or principalities or powers, 
— all things were created by him and for him." 



222 GOD PREPARING 

" For it pleased the Father that in him should all 
fulness dwell; and, having made peace through the 
blood of his cross, by him to reconcile all things unto 
himself, whether they be things in earth or things 
in heaven." 

Thus all created minds are to contribute, as well 
as to receive, a showing forth of God, and this show- 
ing forth or glory of God is to feed their intelli- 
gence, glorify their feeling and kindle the rapture 
of their worship forever. For this, God has planned 
in the work of Jesus Christ, as in all other works 
in all other worlds, to show to the ages to come 
the exceeding riches of his character and the great- 
ness of the love wherewith he loves us all. " And 
I heard the voice of many angels round about the 
throne, and the beasts and the elders, and the num- 
ber of them was ten thousand times ten thousand, 
and thousands of thousands, saying with a loud 
voice : ' Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to re- 
ceive power and riches and wisdom and strength and 
honor and glory and blessing.' And every creature 
which is in heaven and on the earth and under the 
earth, and such as are in the sea, and all that are 
in them, heard I saying, ^ Blessing and honor and 
glory and power be unto him that sitteth on the 
throne and unto the Lamb forever and ever.' " 
They come in thus, you perceive, from every part 
in height or depth, to bask in the common glory that 
shines upon and through and for them all. And so 
in the ages to come the death of Christ, in our par- 
ticular world and for it, is bringing out the exceed- 
ing riches of God's grace in us and the great love 



THE STATE OP GLORY 223 

wherewith he loved us, and commnnicating God to 
the populations of glorj forever, a contribution re- 
paid by what they also communicate to us. 

Having seen in this manner how God de- 
signs, through Christ in his death and Christ living 
in his disciples, to prepare a more complete com- 
munication of himself to other worlds and ages, let 
us pause a few moments on the truth exhibited and 
bring into view some of the more interesting points 
of instruction involved in it. And first consider the 
certain blindness and presumption of those who im- 
agine that they perfectly comprehend the matter 
and means and whole philosophy of the work of re- 
demption by Jesus Christ. That we can be said to 
know something about it, all that we need to know, is 
certainly true. That he is our sacrifice, our ransom, 
our peace, that he is the Lamb, that God is in him, 
that in him we are freely justified as he is freely 
made a curse for us, and that he will be made unto 
us wisdom, righteousness, sanctification and redemp- 
tion, these and other things we know; but there are 
many, I grieve to say, who assume that they know 
the how of the whole proceeding, — how the death of 
Christ operates in respect to all the vast outlying 
concerns and governmental reasons of God's infinite 
plan — so that if anyone doubts or questions the phi- 
losophy they have concerning the matter they are 
offended, counting it even a denial of Christ him- 
self. They imagine that a man can understand this 
transcendent mystery of God, in all its reasons and 
workings, as easily as if it were a sum in arithmetic 
or a rule in grammar. Alas ! it wholly escapes them 



224 eOD PREPARIKG 

that God lias done this work for the ages to come, 
to be an eternal study for all glorified minds, that 
they may discover more and more of God and the 
exceeding riches of his grace in it forever. They 
have it now, they know it all by rote, and cannot 
distinguish between the petty theories of men and 
the stupendous mystery of the plan itself. A doubt 
of one is an offence against the other. O, if they 
are ever saved by it and accepted in it before God, 
how will they blush to see the narrow limits of their 
theories all swept away, and the transcendent mys- 
teries of the plan opening new depths of wisdom and 
love to the admiring study of angels and principali- 
ties forever and ever. The difficulty of fathoming 
the infinite polity of God's infinite government, so 
as to understand the entire import and philosophy of 
Christ's person, work and passion, it would seem 
might occur to any thoughtful disciple. How as- 
tonishing will it appear to them that they could have 
thought to know so much when they knew so little, 
and could have been so ready to judge all doubts 
and questions regarding that which is given to be 
the study of all the ages to come, and of all the 
glorified minds of God's eternal kingdom ! 

We perceive in this connection how the minds of 
the glorified are to be enlarged and how their joy 
will be supported, by the fuller and more com- 
plete discovery and communication to them of God. 
For as he is proposing by his works of Providence 
and grace, here in our world, to show to the ages 
to come the exceeding riches of his love and the 
glory of his character, so in other ways endlessly 



THE STATE OF GLOEY 225 

diversified he is doubtless doing in all the other 
worlds and populations of his immense empire. He 
creates, governs, redeems if need be, in ways that 
evince the fertility of his wisdom and reveal the 
glory of his character, all in the same intent, — that 
is, to bring out more fully the infinite greatness of 
his attributes and communicate more perfectly him- 
self. How little do we now conceive of his true 
magnificence and glory compared with the revelation 
yet to be made. When we come to learn the ways 
of God and see his methods unfolded, in the experi- 
ence had of him in all the provinces and unknown 
spheres of his kingdom, then to see the relations of 
so many parts in the common whole or system, so to 
ascend the hill of his glory and look out farther and 
up higher and down deeper into the vast abysses of 
his wisdom, his character and his infinite sover- 
eignty, — how amazingly will our conceptions of God 
be enlarged, how many childish errors will be cor- 
rected, how many dark things cleared, how many 
limitations swept away. Then we shall begin to see 
things in their proportions and their relation to the 
order and completeness of his plan. Our study will 
lead us on, if the beholding of glory can be called 
a study, and we shall have it as the food of our joy, 
the spring of our exaltation forever, that we are re- 
ceiving more of God. 

Manifestly such resources can never be exhausted, 
such springs never become dry. Many disciples 
seem to suffer a kind of subtle apprehension that, 
after all, the exercise and food of heavenly enjoy- 
ment may not sufiice, may want diversity. O, if 



226 GOD PREPARING 

thej could break loose from their dull apprehen- 
sions to conceive the immense society, the contri- 
butions it brings together, the exceeding riches it 
will show, the immense volumes of knowledge it 
will open, the thoughts it will raise and the sense 
of the divine participation it will forever waken 
in the consciousness of the glorified, how dif- 
ferent would be their thought! They would be far 
more likely in such a case to suffer the dread of be- 
wilderment, lest the opening of such fields of light 
should dazzle the mind's apprehension, lest the va- 
riety and immensity of Grod's revelations, too great 
to be received, should discourage the understanding 
and the excess of glory turn to darkness. It would 
be so, if our souls were not also to be wonderfully 
enlarged and quickened and cleared and glorified by 
their fuller participation of God and his divine nat- 
ure. They will be able to endure so great effulgence 
of light only because they are raised in the plane of 
their intelligence and become luminous in them- 
selves. Indeed, the very fact that the food of their 
eternity is seen to be exhaustless will be itself the 
soul of their courage ; and their song will never tire, 
for the reason that discovery will never be ended 
and the summits of their praise never reached. That 
their character and capacity miust be forever rising, 
growing great and divine, as it drinks in more of 
God and covers itself more perfectly with his glory, 
is sufficiently evident, — consequently that the beings 
we now call men will at last be raised in volume and 
rank so as to overtop all our present conceptions 
of their significance, — kings, priests, principalities, 



THE STATE OF GLORY 227 

powers, thrones! I have no word to name them or 
thought to conceive them. 

Consider the glorious assurance we have in this 
subject that Christ will do for his people all that 
is possible and best for their spiritual advancement. 
If God quickens us together with Christ, raises us 
up together and makes us sit together in heavenly 
places, not merely because of the great love where- 
with he loves us, but in the higher ulterior purpose 
that in the ages to come he may show the exceeding 
riches of grace through us to all glorified minds, how 
certain is it that he will do everything for us, and 
that if we are straitened we shall not be straitened 
in God but in ourselves. How can we imagine that 
God will fail us or stint us in the measure of our 
gifts, when he has a purpose so high to be realized 
through us? How can we imagine, if he is coming 
to be glorified thus in his saints, and admired in all 
them that believe, that he will not pour out all his 
riches to us and give us every help to perfect us in 
his own likeness. What in fact is he seen to be do- 
ing in his people, but communicating to them of him- 
self as fully as possible, even as our apostle says: 
" Granting us according to the riches of his glory, 
to be strengthened with might by his spirit in the 
inner man, that Christ may dwell in our hearts by 
faith, that we being rooted and grounded in love 
may comprehend with all saints what is the breadth 
and length and depth and height and to know the 
love of Christ which passeth knowledge, that we may 
be filled with all the fulness of God." 

Say not then, nor imagine within, that Christ 



228 GOD PREPARING THE STATE OF GLORY 

will fail you in your highest endeavors. Only 
believe and you shall have, nay you shall have ex- 
ceeding abundantly above what you can ask or even 
think, according to the power that worketh in you 
and the glory to be revealed in your salvation. That 
by which God is to shine before all worlds he will as- 
suredly polish by his discipline and irradiate by his 
love. Young Christian, here is hope, a sure ground 
of hope for you. God knows your weakness even bet- 
ter than you do, but if you can trust him he will as- 
suredly pour his fulness upon you and be a Saviour 
to the uttermost in you. Christ himself declares: 
" The glory which thou gavest me I have given 
them," and he wants to prove it true. If, then, your 
courage sometimes faints, if your faith is sometimes 
weakened and you are ready even to despair of suc- 
cess, consider for what you are apprehended of God 
and go on to apprehend the mark yourself. Under- 
stand that he will do for you according to the riches 
of his glory, and accept his promise to be ever with 
you. Lay hold firmly of your strong hope in Christ 
and say in every downcast moment of shame and 
self -discouragement : ^^ Yet shall I be glorious in the 
eyes of the Lord and my God shall be my strength." 
We are very apt to think that God will do less for 
us than we need becaues we are so insignificant; but 
God has a use to make of us, remember, that is not 
measured by our insignificance, — to communicate 
through us the glory even of his own transcendent 
excellence and mercy in the raising of sinners to 
their heavenly places. 



PART III 

SELECTIONS FROM SERMONS 

He said unto his disciples, Gather up the fragments that 
remain, that nothing be lost. 



The following Extracts from Sermons, left by the author in 
their original rough and unrevised state, must of course lack much 
of due proportion and balance. It has not seemed necessary as a 
rule to indicate omissions, or the slight verbal changes they in- 
volved. The best, and indeed the only possible, course in making 
selections appeared to be that of choosing the strongest statement, 
while abandoning much of logical method. — Editor. 



HEAEIlSra AND DOING ^ 

For if any be a hearer of the word, and not a doer, he 
is like unto a man beholding his natural face in a glass ; 
for he beholdeth himself, and goeth his way, and straight- 
way forge ttetli what manner of man he was. — James i. 
23, 24. 



Hearers of all classes, and sometimes doubtless 
almost the whole of a Christian assembly, go forth 
out of the house of God under impressions so sacred 
and glorious that, if we could read their hearts, we 
should discover there a wish always to continue in 
their present feeling as the abiding joy of life. And 
yet how soon every vestige of their exalted and 
luminous feeling is gone, vanished and lost forever. 
Now it is precisely the truth discovered in these 
examples that my text explains ; the simile turns not 
on the correspondence of the image in the glass to 
the person, but upon the fugitive quality of the im- 
age. Just so it is, the apostle would say, with hear- 
ing separated from doing. The impression vanishes, 
even as the image one catches of his face when pass- 
ing by a mirror. The principle affirmed is this, that 
valued impressions under the word can be retained 

* Extracts from a sermon preached in the North Church, Hart- 
ford, January, 1853. 

231 



232 HEARING AND DOING 

or fastened only by the doing or practical use of 
the hearer. 

These spiritual states, impressions, holy impulses, 
or attractions are in a condition of flow. They vary 
in kind, quality, depth and force; they flow as a 
river of inward experience whose particles are all in 
motion and cannot be stayed. If at any time we 
are deeply and sacredly impressed, if a holy impulse 
falls upon us which we love to feel and hope we may 
never lose, if we are set in the full blaze of spiritual 
realities and feel the sublime attraction of things 
unseen, resolving to retain if possible the glorious 
impressions that are on us, or even praying to God 
that we may, still they go by and vanish, we cannot 
give them any attribute of permanence till we make 
them practical. 

These impressions under the word, or coming to 
us from it in hours of retirement, by methods we 
cannot trace, are the gales of a spirit that bloweth 
where it listeth, the most serious, most precious, 
sublimest in the grandeur of their import of all the 
gifts that fall to our earthly experience. They re- 
mind us of God, they are voices of God within, 
breathings of the divine love and power, senses of 
the eternity before us, the greatest loss to lose, the 
heaviest charge of our responsibility as men. And 
there is but one way, our apostle says, to receive and 
make them permanent, viz., to put them in practice; 
for practice, like the mordant used in colors, sets 
them fast and makes them stand forever. So if a 
Christian finds that all his best motives pass and 
result in no fixed gain, if his one day a week of 



HEARING AND DOING 233 

freshened impulse passes hj and leaves him to his 
former dryness, it is because there is some defect of 
practice which forbids the sealing of his gift. 

We shall see then, first of all, that good impres- 
sions not carried into practice are good impressions 
abused, and it is the nature of all functions that are 
abused to cease or vanish away. Natural affection, 
despised and trampled, dies out in the soul. The 
sense of truth, trifled with and violated, finally per- 
ishes, and the sacred distinctions of truth and false- 
hood appear even to be lost. Honor, slighted in the 
soul and mocked by deeds of shame, dies out and 
disappears. All high tastes, such as reach after 
beauty, order, purity, usefulness, intellectual power, 
vanish and become lost affinities if they are neglect- 
ed, or not suffered as impulses to pass out into prac- 
tice. So it is with the good impressions and glori- 
ous attractions that visit men under the word of 
Christ, when not carried out into practice. They 
are abused impulses, and they must of necessity 
cease. There is not only nothing to fasten their 
hold in the soul, but everything to disable and expel 
them; even if you wish them to stay, if they bring 
you a certain joy and you bid them welcome as a 
sacred luxury of the mind, they will not stay as a 
luxury. E'othing detains them but to accept them 
in practice and make them governing impulses of the 
life. 

It is another great law that what we sacrifice for 
we permanently and deeply enthrone, and that what 
we cannot endure any sacrifice for can have none 
but a feeble hold of us. Hence the great demand 



234 HEARING ANB DOING 

that accompanies all the holy impulses and better 
inclinings of those who hear the word: ^' Deny thy- 
self, take up thy cross and follow me.'' Christian- 
ity sets in its good impressions, and gives eternity 
to them in the character, by the self-denial and seK- 
sacrifice it connects with practice. There must be 
a choice of the good against opposing choices, that is, 
a choice made real and fixed by sacrifice. But if a 
man will sacrifice nothing to his best convictions 
and holiest inclinings, what chance have they of per- 
manence? How can they be permanent before they 
get hold of the heart and become an accepted law 
of the life? 

Once more, we have still another consideration in 
which the power of practice to consolidate and 
fasten good impressions is discovered: the fact 
that what we put in practice we make our own and 
obtain a certain sense of property in. A good im- 
pression made upon a hearer of the gospel is not 
from himself, but from what he hears, and from the 
attendant spirit of grace operating good suggestions 
and holy convictions in the heart. They are in him, 
but consciously not of him. The feeling he has re- 
specting them is like that which some pedestrian 
might have in respect to the wild prairie over which 
he roams, or on which he sleeps for the night; it 
is nought to him if only he can get well over the 
space it occupies. But if he will fix himself on some 
locality, there take possession by his act of labor, 
identifying himself with the soil and preparing it for 
use by his improvements, then there dawns in his 
mind the sense of property respecting it and it is 



HEARING AND DOING 235 

taken hold of as his permanent right. Every stone 
and tree fixes its mark on his memory, because it is 
his. So when a man turns his good impressions in 
religion to a practical use, when he incorporates them 
with himself by his own struggles and sacrifices and 
repentances and the faith he receives with them, it 
ceases to be with him as with a man who beholdeth 
his face in a glass ; he makes them his own, obtains 
a property in them and holds them by a permanent 
right. So that when he cries, '^ O God, my heart 
is fixed," these also become equally fixed. What 
the word wrought in him is now permanent. He 
holds the word itself by a kind of everlasting prop- 
erty, and calls it his. 

Let me draw a step nearer to you now and trace 
the truth directly home into your practical experi- 
ence. And, first of all, how evident is it that God 
has not planned the world badly in making it a world 
of practice as well as a world of impressions. Many 
appear to wonder and are half disposed to complain 
that we are not kept here in a kind of temple-service, 
all the time receiving holy impressions and feeding 
on sacred truths. Why are we thrust out again im- 
mediately, they ask, into the rough world of gain 
and care and passion, to have all our good impres- 
sions carried away? Sometimes they even quote 
Scripture and ask why it is that God allows the stony 
ground of tribulation or persecution to exist, if it 
prevents the word taking root, — why the cares of this 
world and the deceitfulness of riches to exist, if they 
choke the word and make it unfruitful. But the 
true answer is that there must be a place to practise 



236 HEARING AND DOING 

in, as well as a place to hear; a place where to apply 
and test and set home or fix in the permanence of 
character that which is received in casual and fugi- 
tive impressions. In this view the practice is want- 
ed as much as the word, and we have as little reason 
to complain of one as of the other. iNTay, it seems 
to be God's opinion that many times as much of prac- 
tice as of hearing are wanted to turn our good im- 
pressions to the best effect. If there were no prac- 
tice, nothing to do but to hear and receive, we should 
in fact receive nothing as a permanent benefit. One 
good impression would chase out another and no 
trace of any be left, any more than there is of a 
man's face in the mirror he once looked in. There- 
fore God ordains practice, that we may have a 
chance to carry impressions into fixed principles, and 
frames of mind into results of character. We must 
be ready to work, sacrifice, suffer and wait, living 
by faith when we cannot by sight; thus and thus 
only do we get any benefit of the word, or of life 
itself. We are purified only as we are tried in the 
word, sealed as we abide, glorified as we are victori- 
ous in it. 

In all Giiristian assemblies how many good im- 
pressions are made, how many high thoughts lifting 
the soul toward eternity are kindled, and then how 
lightly do they pass away! The most precious gifts 
and most expensive to God, considering the cross 
whence they come, once gone are impossible to be 
restored, evanescent beyond the power of words to 
retain them, every one to be accounted for under 
conditions of responsibility tremendous as the worth 



HEARING AND DOING 237 

of the soul, hardening the mind they do not soften, 
a savor of death when they cannot be of life. O, 
what a history is being written thus by every hearer 
against himself, who heard but does not practise and 
appropriate! Your heart, too, on which these im- 
ages of the divine light have been daguerreotyped is 
growing less susceptible, like a plate worn out by 
repeated use, and still the indisposition to practice 
what you hear requires a greater force than ever to 
overcome it. What a work is this that is going on 
in you, my hearers, under the word! If we meet 
you here again, shall it be still found, as now, that 
you hear and do not; that no good impression of all 
your life is yet fixed ; that your soul is still empty of 
all that heaven has poured into it, and you yourself, 
a man or woman nearing the shore of your eternity, 
so often reminded but forgetting still, as if life were 
only a dream, what manner of man you are? 

Again, we learn what value to set on a religion of 
mere internal exercises and why such a kind of re- 
ligion is inconstant or unreliable, because it is a re- 
ligion of impressions and not of practice. To-day 
the soul is all in a flame, burning up in a firework 
of ecstasies and divine raptures. But to-morrow, 
like a spent rocket, it is on the ground. Then it was 
calling on the slow, chiding the careful, blaming the 
dull plodders of faithfulness and crying, " Come and 
see the glory." J^ow, it is a dead coal which no fire 
will kindle, soaked in the rains of the night and sat- 
urated with the salt of Sodom and its pleasures. 
There is even a want of conscience discoverable, a 
plain defect in many things even of common prin- 



238 HEARING AND DOING 

ciple. How could there be any principle, where 
there is no practice? How could anything abide 
where there is nothing done? Here you have a true 
account of a great part of the inconstancy of the 
inconstant, even according to the opinion of our 
blessed Lord himself, who was careful to give his 
first disciples an explicit warning on this very point : 
^^ And every one that heareth these sayings of mine, 
and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish 
man, which built his house upon the sand. And the 
rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds 
blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell, and 
great was the fall of it." 

O, there was one of us who has gone up from us 
into his rest, who understood this truth and gave an 
illustration, how sublime, of its power! It was his 
both to hear and to do, always. E'othing was good 
to him in the hearing that was not good enough to 
do. And where was there a call or an opportunity 
that his faithful spirit was not ready and forward 
to seize? " For to his power, yea and beyond his 
power, he was willing of himself." And the rock 
of consistency on which he stood, when was it ever 
shaken ? The example of constancy and holy beauty 
and official fidelity in which he lived, when was it 
ever corrupted? As the Saviour himself had de- 
clared, the storms did fall and the floods came and 
the winds blew and beat upon that frail house, O, 
how terribly ! shaking down the throne even of rea- 
son itself, but still it fell not ; and when, at the close, 
the assault of the elements was stayed and the fury 
was hushed, we saw the building scathed and shat- 



HEARING AND DOING 239 

tered but still standing, and we plainly discerned that 
the rock was under it. So be it with us, my brethren, 
as with this our brother in glory. 

Would that some holy desire and purpose might 
enter into us all to make our hearing a better than 
fugitive benefit, to win our faith with it, and to our 
faith to add our practical obedience; so that all our 
holy impressions, our right convictions, our yearn- 
ings after God and character may be sealed by our 
practice and entered into the permanence of our 
eternity ! Why should we desire to be drawn when 
we will not follow, enlightened when we will not 
see, kindled when we will not burn? Why flutter 
as insects about the glorious lamp of truth, only to 
scorch our wings and die in the flame? 



THE ETEEOTTY OF LOYE * 
Charity never faileth. — 1 Cor. xiii. 8. 

[My subject isf ] the durable and ceaseless charac- 
ter, the essential eternity of love, considered as a 
fixed passion of the eternal soul. 

And it ought to have this enduring character for 
reasons that are obvious: 

1. Because it has a permanent source — Jesus 
Christ, the same yesterday, to-day and forever, un- 
changeable in his love and so an abiding and fixed 
root of love in his followers. " Eor love is of 
God; '' whence it follows that if God is the source, 
the love kindled in us from his central heat ought to 
be permanent as its source. 

2. The joy of love is inexhaustible, l^o one tires 
of love. ]^o power exercised by it demands a res- 
pite. All the springs of the soul are full to over- 
flowing when it is in God's love. It lubricates the 
play of thought, feeling, purpose, every faculty, 
and keeps it fresh forever. It makes a state eter- 
nally and completely luminous. " He that loveth 
his brother abideth in the light." 

3. There would be no use in the new creating 

* Extracts from a sermon preached in the North Church, Hart- 
ford, March, 1859. 

f These words in brackets are supplied to make good a consider- 
able omission. 

240 



THE ETERNITY OF LOVE 241 

grace of love, no good reason why it should be re- 
generated in lis, if it were a fitful and frail power, 
like the transitory, momentary impulses it has to 
contend with in us. It can finally regenerate all 
bad impulse only as it has a lasting and durable hold 
of us. It must be the love that never faileth, else 
it might as well not be at all. 

4. This love must be enduring because it pro- 
poses for its end a mission to organize an eternal 
society, knitting souls to souls, men to angels, angels 
to men and all to God in a grand fraternity of bless- 
edness. It gives to each a property in all, to enjoy 
all as being enjoyed and loved by all. In a word, 
it organizes heaven, and must therefore be a bond 
as durable as heaven, else it is unreliable and worth- 
less. God, therefore, stakes even the eternal order 
of his empire on the essentially indestructible basis 
of love, calling it the charity that never faileth. The 
stars may fall, gravity may let go of matter, matter 
itself may lapse, the everlasting hills dissolve and 
be no more; but love which is of God and durable 
as God, this he makes the foundation of his throne, 
"the constitutive bond and law that is to organize, con- 
serve and sustain the eternity of blessing in which 
his counsel turns. 



Christian love is, properly speaking, neither an 
emotion nor a sentiment. These are excitements or 
movements of the soul that affect only some particu- 
lar sensibility at a particular time; but love is a 
power that occupies and moves the whole man. 



242 THE ETERNITY OF LOVE 

Pity, for example, is a movement of the sensibility 
at one particular point and by reason of some special 
occasion. Love is no sucb partial, limited affection. 
It is the longing of one's whole nature, the ruling 
and fixed passion of the man. As contrasted with 
an emotion, it is a kind of all-motion, the bent, the 
polar force of a durable attraction fastened in the 
man. Another and stronger contrast between emo- 
tions or sentiments on one side and love on the other 
is to be seen in their merely transitional, momentary 
character. They cease with their occasion, while 
love is abiding and fixed. Thus the word emotion 
means a moving out of feeling into the foreground 
of the moment, elicited by some object or appeal. 
The cries of orphans, the wants of starving families, 
any sort of woe, distress or wrong, any sort of great 
action or beautiful conduct excites emotion. The 
theatre is the place of emotions, emotions are the 
luxury of theatres. Men go there to buy the luxury 
and count themselves repaid if they get the hour- 
long bliss expected. But such emotions do not wake 
again the next morning with the theatre-goer when 
he wakes. They even die out and cease before he 
reaches home. All emotions cease with their occa- 
sions. But it is not so with the state or fixed pas- 
sion of love. It abides, stays with the man all day, 
wakes with him in the morning when he wakes, and 
he has even slept his sleep as a loving man. His 
heart is drawn by the magnetism of a divine polarity, 
settled thus to its pole of eternal aspiration, even as 
the needle itself. Thus when David says : " My 
heart is fixed, God, my heart is fixed," he de- 



THE ETERNITY OF LOVE 243 

scribes the true reality of love without using the 
word. He means that he is settled by a divine love, 
which is the fixed passion of his nature. 

Again, it will be seen that emotions and senti- 
ments pass into no practical results. Sometimes the 
momentary impulse will beget a single momentary 
act, the giving of a charity for example, but gen- 
erally the impulse dies in the bosom, issuing in no 
results of action at all. On the other hand, every 
sort of love actuates the man practically, settles the 
ends, determines the doing of his life. And the true 
Christian love will in this way set a man to a life 
of charity, seeking after objects and occasions and 
works to be done. It bends the soul practically to 
its objects. It is itself the soul of action, and so it 
grows into greatness, proves itself real and true and 
fashions thus a Christly man. There is no pretence, 
no cheat in it, for it is no idling play of the heart, 
but a real, honest, fij^ed passion of doing the good 
that wants to be done. Again, the emotions and sen- 
timents create no fixed aspirations; whereas it is in 
the nature of all love to be an aspiration after its 
object. All fixed passions, such as avarice, the lust 
of power, the thirst for revenge, the love of a person, 
are in their very nature aspirations. Accordingly 
some of the most emotional, most sentimental people 
are such as have really no fixed aspirations at all. 
They will luxuriate in all beautiful sentiments re- 
specting God and his character and works. They 
will weep under sermons, melt under Christ's pas- 
sion with all finest sympathy, swell into loftiest ad- 
miration of God's majesty and greatness, and yet 



244 THE ETERNITY OF LOVE 

will never truly come to God or set themselves prac- 
tically with him, because they have no aspirations. 
Love in their hearts would be a fixed passion, tend- 
ing ever toward him. '^ Whom have I in heaven but 
thee/' is the language of it, and it puts the soul on 
sacrifice, labor, love, persistent prayer and faithful 
striving, that they may come unto him and find his \ 
friendship. 

Every man's love determines what he will be in 
character. He is as his love, and not otherwise. 
If he loves the bad, the low, the false, the selfish, 
his love is the fixed affinity of his soul with what he 
loves. If he loves what is honorable, right, true, 
good, God and Christ and heaven, his love will 
mould his character to its object. Hence it is de- 
clared that " every one that loveth is born of God," 
that the changing of a man's ruling love changes the 
man, makes him a new man, because the love of 
God into which he has come must needs be the root 
of a character in him which is God-like. Love, in 
short, is not emotion, but motion rather; not some 
jet of feeling raised by objects and occasions, but the 
practical drift and current of the man. 

It is a love which takes one off his own centre 
and makes him cease from the minding of his own 
things. The prime example of it is in Christ him- 
self and his life and death of sacrifice. It is such a 
kind of love as takes on itself as a burden the wrongs 
and woes and wants and spiritual undoing of others. 
It puts the subject in a vicarious position, like even 
to that of Christ himself, to bear other men's bur- 
dens, to be willingly afflicted and sacrificed for them, 



THE ETERNITY OF LOVE 245 

to forgive their wrongs, to cling to them mercifully 
even in their unrighteous enmities. Call such love 
as this an emotion, a sentiment! class it with these 
firefly gleams of natural feeling! What have they 
in common with it? What has it with them? Why, 
it is divine, the God-power fallen upon man! By 
what bridge will any of these natural emotions or 
sentiments pass over into this love of enemies, this 
passion of self-sacrifice, this devotion to the evil and 
shameful and low? Christ only, Christ revealed in 
the man, — he is the soul of this love; it is supernat- 
ural and divine. This love is of God, it comes down 
as Christ and with him from above, and fashions a 
supernal character wholly by itself. The various 
human loves we talk of are only the natural types of 
it, generating words by which to speak of it, images 
by which to conceive it, but are as different from it 
in kind as fiesh and spirit, matter and God. 

O, this Charity that never faileth, soul of God's 
beauty, bond of all perfectness! Length, breadth, 
depth, height! Love of God that passeth knowl- 
edge! On this deep sea of God's fulness the ages 
of eternity navigate and the tides of eternity swing. 
Hither, mortals, come and hear the sounding of the 
many waters, beating out their hymn eternal on the 
tremulous shores. This is love's grand world of or- 
der and life, full and free and deep and strong, the 
empowered and organized bliss, the settled state of 
glorified society in God. O, God of love, mercifully 
grant that we may none of us come short of this thy 
fulness 1 



THE MOTIONS or SIXS * 

For when we were in the flesh, the motions of sins, 
which were by the law, did work in our members to bring 
forth fruit unto death. — Rom. vii. 5. 



To understand the apostle's full meaning in this 
rather peculiar expression, the motions of sinSy we 
need to observe that he is describing two states or 
conditions of life with their points of contrast or 
distinction, the state of nature and the state of 
grace, the flesh and the spirit, the being in the law 
and the being in Christ. In the flesh, that is in our 
own will and mere natural powers of character, he 
declares that we are insufficient, that if we under- 
take to extirpate our sins they are too many and 
subtle and active for us, and that if we bring our- 
selves up to the law to square ourselves legally by 
it, acting by our own will, the very law goads them 
to greater activity instead of reducing them to sub- 
jection. They only work more powerfully in our 
members as they are more exasperated, and bring 
forth their fruits of death in a more abundant har- 
vest. But coming away from ourselves, to live by 
faith in God as revealed in Jesus Christ and be en- 
tered into his all-quickening spirit, we are free. 
" ]!!Tow we are delivered from the law, that being 

* Extracts from a sermon preached in the North Church, Hart- 
ford, May, 1853, June, 1864. 

346 



THE MOTIONS OF SINS 247 

dead wherein we are held, that we should serve in 
newness of spirit and not in the oldness of the let- 
ter." 

These two points are suggested which demand our 
particular attention. 

I. That sins are not dead facts but active powers, 
superior in a sense to our control, until we pass over 
into a state of faith and divine participation. 

II. That they have and must have their deadly 
fruits until that state is reached. 

Sins are active powers, having motion and work- 
ing in the members. It is not with sin or sins as 
with the common external acts and doings of life. 
These, being done, are simply done and that is the 
end. ]^either are they like mere facts or scenes 
treasured up in the memory, there to lie inert and 
as it were cease to be, till they are called up by some 
act of recollection. Nothing merely treasured in 
the memory has motion there, or any of the quali- 
ties of power. If we say that every sin daguerreo- 
types its image in the soul^ as we properly enough 
may, speaking only in a figure, still there is this very 
remarkable difference, that the plate on which a 
daguerreotype image is cast is inert, the figure lies 
dead upon it as the plate itself, having no mo- 
tion or working at all. But an image of wrong 
or guilt imprinted thus on the soul is imprinted on 
a vital substance, there to mix in with all its vital 
processes of thought and feeling, bringing shame 
and self-accusation, aggravating its lusts, embitter- 
ing its reflections, breeding a disingenuous self-ex- 
cusing spirit, making it desperate, discordant, an easy 



248 THE MOTIONS OF SINS 

prey to temptation. How can a soul whose cham- 
bers are printed all over with images of bad thoughts 
and foul or wicked actions escape the mixing of these 
with all its works and inclinations, and having them 
work into the life by a motion as persistent as its 
own? 

The same truth is presented in another view, if 
we consider the effect of sin upon the nature of the 
doer. Every sin reacts upon the agent as a breach 
of his internal harmony. Being an act against God, 
it is an act against the organization of the soul as it 
comes from God. Accordingly it breaks the orig- 
inal harmony, shatters the order, defiles the purity 
of the soul. It is as if one were to use his hands in 
the handling of red-hot iron or his eyes in gazing at 
the sun. Hands and eyes not being made for any 
such use are injured incurably by it. In like man- 
ner sin, violating the soul's nature, mars its func- 
tions and shatters its inward harmony. And then, 
since it still goes on to work and think and live in 
its shattered state, all the effects of all its sins blend 
withi the confusion and craze the motion of its 
powers. Thus, if a machine had some part injured 
or broken, no harm would ensue as long as the ma- 
chine stood still; but as soon as it begins to move 
the broken member comes into the play of that mo- 
tion, working with it, jolting, crashing and tearing, 
till the whole machine is a wreck. And so it is that 
sins, all oldest and remotest sins, have motion still 
and continue to work as active powers in the soul. 
"We cannot keep them still or get away from their 
action by anything we can do, as acting on ourselves. 



THE MOTIONS OF SINS 249 

"We must even disjoint our very nature itself to 
do it. 

It may not be a mistake to imagine that the apos- 
tle, in speaking of the motions of sins and their 
working in the members, had a mental reference to 
the action of poisons. Once taken into the body, 
they commence a virulent and terrible action in 
every part, which nothing can stay or avert. The 
circulations are all circulations of death. Every 
part is maddened with torture and sometimes the 
motions of the poison are so swift and violent that 
death ensues in a very few minutes. Fermentation 
is another analogy that represents the motions of 
sins. The whole mass heaves and foams, because 
the very little leaven infused had such a power of 
motion. Even the strongest vessels are burst by 
these propagated motions in the mass of fluid they 
contain. Or, better still, he may refer to the an- 
alogy of the eye, when some speck of foreign matter 
is in it. The eye weeps and quivers and rolls. ISTow 
the offending particle is here, now it is there. If 
the patient endeavors to hold still by his mere resolu- 
tion, and see and act as if nothing had happened, 
he cannot do it. So it is with the motions of sins; 
they are offending particles in the eye of the soul 
and they work in the member despite all effort to 
suppress their motion. 

IsTor is this mere theory, but a matter even of 
consciousness. Our feeling is that insidious and bad 
powers are somehow struggling in us. Sometimes 
this conviction is raised to a pitch that alarms us, and 
we are put upon earnest endeavors to conquer a bet- 



250 THE MOTIONS OF SINS 

ter life. But the more violently we struggle the 
more palpably do we fail, until we come to God and 
place our trust in him. We cannot be righteous out 
of all right relation, for it is our only right relation 
to live as in God, conscious of God, penetrated and 
filled by the divine life, even as the stars are filled 
with his orderly will and turned about by his coun- 
sel. But our sin has taken us away from God. In 
it we pass into ourselves, take ourselves into our 
own hands and undertake to shape our own way, as 
we do to accomplish our own ends. Being thus in 
the flesh and not in the Spirit, we are unable to put 
ourselves back into the harmony of a righteous and 
pure life. To will is present, but how to perform 
we do not find. We feel ourselves to be in the 
hands of a power we cannot master. Good resolu- 
tions do not clear us, but there comes down shortly 
a power that sweeps them all away and leaves us 
where we were. Some lust breaks loose, sonie bad 
thought steals upon us, some temper springs upon 
us from behind, and we find that our soul is full of 
motions or evil instigations that push us away from 
our point, and every seeming advantage gained van- 
ishes. 

We come now to the second point stated, that 
these motions of sins must work till they issue in 
death, unless there is a turning to God by faith and 
a receiving of him as the power of a new life. 

In the first place, being motions of disorder they 
must work disorder, as certainly as the motions of 
a broken machine will propagate the disorder begun, 
or as the circulations of a poison will propagate the 



THE MOTIONS OF SINS 251 

virus of the poison. Education may dress up and 
drill into a plausible show of character. There may 
be honesty, amiability, a fair show of finish in all the 
conventionalities of life. There may be a close ob- 
servance of all the rules or by-laws of morality and 
religion. Still, "under cover of all this, there may 
yet be motions of sins, doing their dreadful work 
as certainly as the open vices of licentiousness do 
theirs. Indeed, selfishness sometimes appears to 
become even more concentrated and desperate under 
the suppressive force of decency and outward cor- 
rectness than anywhere else. Life becomes in that 
case an element of calculation, where everything is 
done, even the most decent and politest things, for 
mere self-advantage. Ambition, covetousness, fash- 
ion — what powers of motion are at work in these, 
and how dreadfully do they inthrall their victim! 
I say their victim, for the agent here is the victim. 
Every motion of his self-serving, self -pleasing, self- 
glorifying life winds the fetters of his sin more tight- 
ly about him, and makes him more and more im- 
potent as regards the power of escape. 

Again, it will be foimd as a matter of fact that 
every sort of sin moves or invites some other to be 
its fellow. As the man who steals his neighbor's 
goods must needs lie also to avoid detection, so it is 
with every other kind of sin. It wants and calls 
upon others to come and be its fellows. If a man 
hates another, he will blacken him by injustice 
enough to justify his hatred. If a man is proud, 
he will try to hold himself up by thrusting down all 
that are next to him. If a man is envious, he will 



252 THE MOTIONS OF SINS 

pull down, those that are above him. Allowing any 
lust to have its freedom, any passion to go unbridled, 
this lust, this passion will even take possession of 
your head and build some theory there, by which at 
length the indulgence will become a mode of liber- 
ality, or of reason, or perchance even of religion it- 
self. These motions of sins are all active, not ceas- 
ing even with the dreams of the night, but tossing 
and heaving and beckoning others to join them, till 
their host is legion and their power complete. Every 
conscript will become in time a recruiter, and the 
enrolment will go on whether you desire it or not. 
IsTor does it make any so great difference whether the 
character is kept in a train of outward fairness and 
respect. Under that decent cover, the motions of 
sins will be as busy as where there is no restraint of 
their riot. They will come into the feeling and 
touch the fibres one by one with their poison. They 
will harden all the paths of thought, if they do not 
turn their courses. They will muffle right convic- 
tion. They will beguile the former ingenuousness 
and make it seem to be a weakness or defect of rea- 
son. In a word, they will bring to pass just what 
distinguishes an old man without God from a young 
man in the freshness and quivering sensibility of a 
nature visited hourly with gleams of that paradise 
for which it was made. After these motions of sins 
have been coursing for seventy years through the 
soul, under any guise of character however plausible, 
they become both warp and woof to all habit, 
thought, feeling and desire. So to untwist or ravel 
the texture as to get them out is then no easy thing. 



THE MOTIONS OF SINS 253 

The mind is dark, the susceptibilities are dull. God 
is afar off, eternity a shadow, and the powers of the 
world to come no powers at all, compared with the 
motions of sins that have wrought in the members 
and so nearly brought forth fruit unto death. 

I have thus endeavored to sketch as briefly as pos- 
sible the motions and pathologic effects of sin. I 
have brought you no wisdom from afar. I have 
simply spoken to your own consciousness and to evi- 
dences supplied you in things nearest at hand. I 
hope at least this one conviction will have been raised 
in you, — that sins are not acts done and ended, 
or simply treasured up in God's record for a future 
review, not things inert and motionless, but factors 
that enter into all the activity of your life. You 
sometimes indulge the feeling, it may be, that since 
you are doing nothing criminal, observing a correct 
life, maintaining an habitual and careful reverence 
to religion, you are at least doing nothing to make 
your condition worse. Doing nothing? Every- 
thing held still? 'No additions made? No ground 
lost? What, then, has become of the motions of 
sins? No, my friends, there is no greater mistake 
than this, the assumption that you stay as you were. 
Whether you have willed it or not, nay even if your 
will has been firmly set to sin no more, there has 
been a motion going on in you, rapid as your 
thoughts and multiform as they, changing every 
hour your point of standing and the complexion of 
your inward life. Like a boat upon the river you 
have been floating all night down the stream, and 
when the morning comes you will see at a glance that 



254 THE MOTIONS OF SINS 

you are not where you were. These motions of sins 
are working their bad ferment in your members 
every hour and bringing forth their fruit unto death. 
Had you been more abandoned in your hfe you 
might have been more conscious of the fact, but it 
would not be more emphatically true. There is no 
such thing for man as standing still in his trial. He 
is in the boat, and if he does not somehow stem the 
current he will as certainly be floated downward with 
it. The motions of sins are as mighty as the mo- 
tions of the stars, even though they be as silent. If 
they are hidden from us because they are silent, God 
mercifully grant that your ear may be opened to 
hear the rush of that mighty current within by which 
they are drifting you away. 

Here is the place and exact office of what is called 
regeneration. It is the being born of God, affiliated 
with God in sonship, a change greater than any 
words can express, and more glorious. It takes 
place just at the point when the subject passes over 
to be in the divine life, where he drops the flesh and 
becomes spirit. That which is born of the flesh is 
flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. 
Is spirit, observe. It is as if he became another 
kind of creature, even as the apostle says : " He that 
is joined to the Lord is one spirit,'' that is, one with 
him. And this joining to the Lord — how great a 
thing is it to a soul disjoined, to come into this high 
relation, this conjunction for the first time with the 
divine nature! Now everything proceeds from a 
new point. The poor sinner is not toiling any more 
at and upon himself to beat off the motions of sins 



THE MOTIONS OF SINS 255 

or keep their motion down, — no more serving under 
the law to be galled and discomfited by it, willing 
ever and not finding how to perform, as little able 
to set the broken harmony of his soul in order and 
tune it to the heavenly peace as an instrument un- 
strung to tune itself. 'Noy but he is become spirit. 
He is free, free to good, even as that holier nature 
spread through all the secret members of his life 
enables hir to be. A strange harmony pervades his 
feeling. God, love, truth, everything divine finds a 
congenial place. Existence is a new experience, be- 
cause he exists in God. The contact of divinity 
opens a new sense and all is new. It is the morn- 
ing of a new birth. He is himself and yet how vast- 
ly more — a ray of the divine splendor, a creature 
knowing God and bathed in his fulness. 

Some traveller in Egypt describes, I remember, 
the opening of a cell or chamber in one of the pyra- 
mids, telling how the hum and flutter of innumer- 
able bats disturbed by the approach were heard with- 
in, and how as the light broke into their chamber, 
smoking with the dust of their wings, they fell upon 
the floor and crowded into the crevices of the stone, 
silent all and motionless, paralyzed by the light. So 
it is with the motions of sins, when Christ is received 
by faith, and the darkened chamber where they con- 
gregate and flutter is lighted up by the divine prin- 
ciple now admitted into the soul. They were active 
in the dark, for darkness was their element, but 
where the light of God is shining they are paralyzed 
and still. In such an element they cannot live. In 
the flesh they were all motion, and the sinner could 



256 THE MOTIONS OF SINS 

as little husli them into peace or silence their tumult 
by his will, as he could the tenants of the pyramid; 
but when the light of God is poured in upon them 
they are dazzled and motionless at once. 

Here now, Christian disciples, here is the great 
lesson of wisdom for us, and it may be one that wo 
specially need. We sometimes find, it may be, that 
despite ourselves we are mastered by insidious 
powers of mischief within that we cannot detect or 
quell. They come in Protean shapes, stealing into 
our good works, our passions, our thoughts, our im- 
aginations and even our prayers, so that when we 
seem to be raised highest we are suddenly floored 
and reduced to shame, we scarcely know how. The 
reason is that we are too much in ourselves, too little 
in faith. Perhaps we fall to fighting away these 
enemies and that only gives them a better advan- 
tage. Let in the light upon them, that is all we have 
to do. Come closer to God, be more simple in your 
faith. It is the flesh they love, and all we do in the 
flesh only helps their activity. Be spirit. Have 
such faith that God shall be the spring of movement 
in you. Be transparent to his light, irradiated by 
it in every secret recess of your life, and then you 
shall cry no more ^^ Who shall deliver," but shall 
sing: " I thank God through Jesus Christ my Lord." 
This is the victory that overcometh, even your faith. 



DELIYEEAE-CE IN OHEIST * 

I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord. — RoM. 
vii. 35. 

There is a peculiar power in Christ to assist our 
victory over sins and temptations in the fact that 
he dies or is crucified. There is a wonderfully en- 
sphering power in the embrace of one who has let 
go everything for his cause. Temptations are 
quelled, the motions of sins die, when we come to 
the cross. Some persons look on the language I 
have already referred to on this point as being a 
mere play on words without meaning, and as having 
no sound logical verity. Or they dismiss it as mysti- 
cal, and therefore insignificant. How does it ap- 
pear, they ask, that I die with Christ, or am cruci- 
fied with Christ, or how that I am raised with him? 
How does it appear that I am in any sense in the like- 
ness of his death or should be in the likeness of his 
resurrection? And yet, there is nothing which is 
more certainly true than that a man who comes load- 
ed down with temptation from this world to the cross 
of Jesus and there in love embraces what he looks 
upon, letting the crucified Lord come into his heart's 
feeling, will feel his temptations melting sud- 
denly away and it may be, ere he knows it, com- 

* Extracts from a sermon preached in the North Church, Hart- 
ford, April, 1854. 

257 



268 DELIVERANCE IN CHRIST 

pletely gone? A kind of death has taken place in 
him, the body is dead because of sin, the world is 
dead, the law and the motions of sins that were by 
the law are dead; appetite, lust, self-will, pride, jeal- 
ousy, all the forms of his bondage are dissolved. 
Hence in part the wonderful liberating power of the 
cross. When we embrace it we are crucified, a kind 
of death to evil passes upon us. We are loosened 
from all the ties of bondage in which we were held. 
We are dead, and so are freed from sin. 

This also connects a quickening, renovating power 
received in Christ in which we are raised as it were 
with him, for as we could not in feeling or faith 
embrace a crucified one who is yielding up all things 
for love without a death in ourselves, so we cannot 
at that point embrace a revived, ascended, jubilant, 
triumphant one, without being also assured, elevated 
and as it were started anew by our faith. We 
shall be in the likeness of his resurrection, raised 
up from the dead by the glory of the Father to walk 
in newness of life, dead indeed unto sin, but alive 
unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord. 

In Christ, then, you perceive we die to the flesh 
and begin to live in the Spirit. First, we are loos- 
ened from the old plane of nature and the law, and 
then we are raised up into a higher plane of regener- 
ated life and divine participation, where the soul is 
fed by divine springs and actuated by a new divine 
movement or inspiration of God, — exactly accordant 
with the remarkable language of Paul to the Colos- 
sian brethren, language that is commonly skimmed 
so lightly or taken in a sense so superficial that the 



DELIVERANCE IN CHRIST 259 

grand and massive power of its meaning is lost. " If 
ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things 
which are above, where Christ sitteth at the right 
hand of God. Set your affections on things above, 
not on things on the earth. For ye are dead, and 
yonr life is hid with Christ in God." Here comes 
ont the death, the risen state and the life located 
above, and the new and hidden movement which, 
supplanting all the old strivings of the will and the 
flesh, flows out peacefully and strong from its secret 
springs in God. Being in Christ Jesus the soul is 
thus a new creature ; old things are passed away, be- 
hold all things are become new. The bondage of 
the flesh and the law is burst, and the emancipated 
spirit has ascended, as it were, into its heavenly 
places to live a life hid with Christ in God. 

There is yet another point in Christ where a great 
purchase is obtained against the flesh and the 
temptations by which it is assaulted or held in 
bondage. I speak of the immense and glorious oc- 
cupying power of Christ, and by this I mean the 
power Christ has to occupy, fill up, enlist, inspire 
and lead on the soul. The weakest of all states is 
the idle or unoccupied state. Thus, if a man has 
it on hand to conquer some appetite or corrupt habit 
which has gotten the ascendant over him and brought 
him into bondage, he will do it never in a state of 
idleness, having nothing on hand but simply to face 
his infirmity and fight the battle out with it. In 
order to succeed he needs some positive work or 
duty to fill up his time, occupy his thought, kindle 
his interest, and raise him to a point of enthusiasm 



260 DELIVERANCE IN CHRIST 

in. some other direction. The soul was never made 
to stand empty, never to die without beginning to 
live. Whoever tries to conquer his infirmities by 
putting an extinguisher on his impulses will assur- 
edly fail. A mere negative virtue is impossible. 
Its infallible end is just where the apostle puts it — 
^^ For what I would that do I not, but what I hate 
that do I." If you undertake with a besetting sin, 
having nothing else on hand but to conquer it, then 
you are every moment thinking of it and it is 
every moment feeling of you, pleading with you, 
keeping you conscious of your sensations and turn- 
ing every moment into a hell of conflict, until you 
are made to see something plausible in yielding 
once more to its power. But Christ provides against 
just this infirmity, which is the infirmity of all 
sin, by filling all your affections to the full, 
flooding you with joys that are divine, opening 
to you all the highest fields of thought, even those 
which are ranged by the exploring studies of angels, 
revealing himself in you and making you conscious 
of himself, loading you down with responsibilities, 
tasking you to the utmost of your powers in works 
that were the meat and drink of his own mortal life 
before you. In this manner he proposes to occupy 
your being to the full, and keep you on by a kind 
of inspiration. The whole movement is free and 
positive. There is no idle or unoccupied point left 
where you may begin to parley with temptations. 
The plan is to have you always in the Spirit, for they 
that walk in the Spirit shall not fulfil the lusts of the 
flesh. You are to have no time to look back, for if 



DELIVERANCE IN CHRIST 261 

you do you are not fit for the kingdom of God. 
You are to forget the things that are behind, and 
press toward the mark for the prize. Your engage- 
ment is to be so earnest, the occupation of your soul 
so full and positive, that every temptation v^ill be 
dropped and left behind, every infirmity passed by 
under the momentum of a velocity so rapid and an 
impulse so mighty. The plan answers exactly and 
philosophically to the apostle's exhortation : " Where- 
fore let us lay aside every weight and the sin that 
doth so easily beset us and run the race that is set 
before us." Every weight, he understands, wall be 
thrown aside and every most easily besetting sin, 
when the soul is filled with Christ and the glorious 
high calling of his work. 

Christ then we say (this is our conclusion), Christ 
is sufficient, able to break every bondage, wash every 
crimson color of guilt into the whiteness of snow, 
clear us of every tyrannical habit, succor us from 
every subtle temptation — able, in short, to save unto 
the uttermost with a full and perfect salvation. 



THE WORD GRACE REVIVED* 
To the praise of the glory of his grace. — Eph. i. 6. 

It is with words often as with men, they are mor- 
tal, they die. They are used loosely and subjected 
to such abuses that the life of their meaning per- 
ishes. Exactly this has been the portion of the 
Scripture word, grace. It has been so roughly han- 
dled in the wear of theology, subjected to so many 
artificial strains of construction, and used with so 
great ardor while losing its intelligent meaning, that 
finally its life has quite gone out. Doubtless it is 
a good word and true, but we see nothing in it save 
that it is a monosyllable with a pious sound. Orig- 
inally one of the liveliest and most beautiful words, 
it is now virtually lost to us, it is a dead word. And 
yet in the Scripture it is the vital, central word of 
Christian experience itself. There it stands among 
the living words of faith, or rather, there it lies as 
a dead body in a field of flowers and singing birds, 
once alive to their joy but now alive no longer. 

Is it vain to hope that by a careful and critical 
investigation of this word we may give it a resurrec- 
tion, or restore its vital meaning ? There is no word 
in the whole Scripture on which the plan of God's 

* Extracts from a sermon preached in the North Church, Hart- 
ford, October, 1869. 



THE WORD GRACE REVIVED 263 

mercy to men hangs more implicitly for a fit expres- 
sion than upon this ; it was emphatically the word of 
life when it was alive, and the loss of Christian 
power we suffer in the loss of it is greater than any 
of us are able to conceive, for words are in one view 
things and the loss of a word like this carries a loss 
of truth and Christian power. 

What, then, is grace? What is the true vital 
meaning of this very inert and scarcely significant 
word, so often occurring in the 'New Testament 
Scripture? This we shall discover only by seeking 
out first of all the original sensible meaning of the 
word; for every word applied to signify a spiritual 
or intellectual truth is first the name of some object 
or phenomenon in the world of sense. 

The original word translated grace signifies beauty 
in person or action, as when we speak of graceful 
manners or bearing. Thus also in the Greek 
mythology we discover a group of attendant female 
deities who are called Graces. They were conceived 
of as the most beautiful and, as we say, graceful of 
beings. They were supposed to have a power to 
impart personal charms and, mingling with the 
changes and events of the world, to infuse into them 
thus everything beautiful and agreeable. Hesiod 
regarded them as emblematic of the disposition to 
please or make happy, and as shedding a kind of 
inspiration on all the arts, such as architecture, po- 
etry, eloquence, music and the like, and even upon 
all acts of benevolence and gratitude. 

Turning now to the Scripture, we find the word 
grace used with an outward signification, and draw- 



264 THE WORD GRACE REVIVED 

ing its intellectual and figurative meanings after it 
in the same way. ^^ They shall be an ornament of 
grace to thy head and charms about thy neck." ^^ So 
shall they be life unto thy soul and grace unto thy 
neck." Here you have the true outward sense of 
the word. It denotes that outward appearance by 
which we are filled with a sense of pleasure, and 
which holds us, as it were, by charm, — an attractive, 
benignant, winning look. 

Then next, and by a process the most natural, the 
word is transferred to a secondary moral and spir- 
itual use. Thus it is applied to the person of Christ, 
who is declared to be " the only begotten of the 
Eather, full of grace and truth." The word grace 
does not here indicate, you perceive, that he is vis- 
ited by a sanctifying influence and has his sins for- 
given. It simply means that the beauty and truth 
of God are visible in him; that is to say, the spir- 
itual beauty, all those dispositions and traits of char- 
acter which shine in God. Just so the term is ap- 
plied also as an epithet to describe his words or 
conversation when his hearers are said to have 
" wondered at the gracious words that proceeded out 
of his mouth." There was, it seems, a certain in- 
describable spiritual beauty in his words which filled 
them with wonder. They were literally words of 
grace. 

'Now just here we begin to see how the word grace 
may be applied to denote what is most internal in 
the character of God and is, in fact, the spirit and 
law of his government. He is not surrounded by 
attendant Graces like the principal gods of the 



THE WORD GRACE REVIVED 265 

Greek mythology; but the grace is in him, shining 
in his ways, diffusing itself as a spirit of omnipotent 
love and beauty through the world. How the transi- 
tion is made from the outward sense to the inward 
is well illustrated by the following example, when 
both are associated or set forth together: "The 
Lord make his face to shine upon you and be 
gracious unto you.'' Here you see the shining face 
of beauty coupled with the spirit of love and favor. 

If, then, you will discover the key to the real liv- 
ing meaning of this word in the Scripture, it is here. 
We always associate outward beauty and attractive- 
ness with a spirit of benignity and favor. Thus 
when a subject goes before a prince to sue for some 
extension of favor he says, if he is not repulsed, that 
he was graciously received; that is, there was a cer- 
tain outward manner of carriage toward him, which 
was the fit sign of internal benignity, and which 
therefore he calls gracious. 

The grace of God then is God's beautiful love, 
that which is the soul in him of favor, gentleness, 
compassion and every benignant virtue. Is it any 
wonder that a conception so full of life and so cap- 
tivating to the heart should become the central im- 
age of divine goodness in the scheme of salvation? 
For what is Christ but the living beauty of God in 
the flesh? What does he accomplish but to sur- 
round our human deformity with looks of enchanting 
gentleness and mercy? What glows in his life and 
passion but the spirit of eternal grace and the smiles 
of God's inviting goodness? They are the graces, 
livelier in their charms than Thalia or Euphrosyne, 



THE WORD GRACE REVIVED 

that live in his works and attend his healing minis- 
tries. 

Open now the Bible and note some of the peculiar 
uses of the word grace, and see how it spreads itself 
through the whole fabric of the gospel, making it 
emphatically a scheme of salvation by grace. 

God is described as a being " gracious and merci- 
ful.'' His throne is called " the throne of grace," 
and the gospel itself is represented as a gift that falls 
on men out of the beautiful benignity of his eternal 
character, ^' the dispensation of the grace of God.'' 
The renewing and indwelling Spirit is called " the 
Spirit of grace," imparting gifts of grace, as if the 
very beauty of God and his love were proceeding 
forth to meet us and be shed abroad in us. 

Grace, in short, is the moving power, the source, 
fountain and from eternity the cause of all that 
Christ undertakes and does. His whole mission of 
life is an outgrowth of God's beautiful feeling, and 
his power is the power of God's internal beauty, the 
love, gentleness, undeserved favor, mercy, in one 
word the grace of his divine nature. 

And so, as grace is in the secret heart of God, 
as it is the ornament and charm of all his disposi- 
tions, and the fountain of his works and purposes, 
it results, that we as sinners are not repulsed with 
frowns or set on a footing of stern desert, but on 
a footing of grace, that is, of unmerited favor. And 
the word grace is made use of to designate the terms 
of salvation by Jesus Christ, because of the benig- 
nity of God revealed in Christ, as the patient, con- 
descending, unresentful, merciful outshining of the 



THE WORD GRACE REVIVED 267 

love of God. It was not designed to raise some very 
exact metaphysical or legal distinction between 
justice and mercy. It only conceived in God some- 
thing more winning, free and gracious than mere 
authority or vindicative justice or a sturdy adher- 
ence of will to his own terms of commandment, and 
calls it by a fit contrast the grace of God in Jesus 
Christ. It is God so delighting in the raising up of 
the fallen and the beautifying again of souls that 
are under the deformities and stains of evil, that he 
does not think of doing by them as they deserve. 
To shine upon them and into them, and to let 
gracious words proceed forth out of his mouth, to 
recover them from their deformity and to bring 
them into grace, so that they shall be of it and one 
with himself in it, shall love as he loves, be merciful 
as their Father in heaven is merciful, forgive as 
they are forgiven, and thus have the dispositions of 
grace fulfilled in them and reflect the divine beauty 
that shines upon them, — this is indeed the grace 
of God in sinful men. He is so communicated to us 
in his Son, as received by faith, that every antag- 
onistic evil and deformed principle is to be suffused 
and transformed by his divine beauty. 

As sin itself is a principle of deformity and shame, 
it shall be taken away, that " as sin hath abounded 
grace shall much more abound." As it is bondage, 
so Christ shall make us free. As sin is a coward 
spirit of servility and fear, so under the grace, 
mercy and peace given us in Jesus Christ there shall 
be rest and confidence and boldness to enter the 
holiest. As sin is weakened, so the grace of Christ 



^Q8 THE WORD GRACE REVIVED 

shall be ever sufficient to give strength, to bear up 
the soul in every conflict and give it perpetual vic- 
tory. As sin is a hell of tumultuous and disorderly 
passion in the soul, so the grace of the cross and the 
beautiful spirit of the Lord's death will be a cruci- 
fixion to all such unruly work in the members. Or 
if we say, as including all, that sin is death, even 
so shall grace reign through righteousness and eter- 
nal life, by Jesus Christ our Lord. 

And this is what is meant by ^' growing in grace.'' 
It means that the divine beauty and good, expressed 
with a charm so powerful in Christ, are to be an 
element about us, and that we are to grow up into 
it as being of it and like it, changed with the same 
image from glory to glory, even as if by the breath- 
ing of the Lord within us. As the animal and vege- 
table kingdoms are colored by the light of the sun, 
so the light of the glory of God in the face of Jesus 
Christ is to shine into us and produce in us the liv- 
ing colors and graces of the divine character. 

Why is it then that so many persons have a pride 
against being saved by grace, why so prone to a vir- 
tue of work in distinction from faith? They seem 
to imagine that God imposes this as a condition of 
salvation to humble them, a condition purposely de- 
signed to cut down their self-respect. Is it, then, 
degrading to be encircled and filled by the divine 
beauty? Is it humiliating, is it an offence to the 
pride of a mortal to have the graces and charms of 
divine goodness lingering around him and breathing 
their spirit into him? Is it more honorable to be 
saved by works than by grace? more free and 



THE WORD GRACE REVIVED 269 

nobler to be justified by the deeds of the law than 
by faith? It seems to me that when a sinner of 
mankind beholds the gracious look of his God in the 
life and passion of Jesus, when the graces of God's 
internal character and the depths of his feeling are 
opened there to his view, and when he is called to 
look into this glass with a face unveiled and be 
changed into this same image from glory to glory, 
it need not mortify him. What should he sooner 
do, were it only for ambition's sake, than to let what 
is loveliest and highest in God communicate with 
him and enter as a quickening and regenerating 
power into his nature. For this is the only aim and 
import of what we call salvation by grace. 

In this view what an elevation of consciousness 
belongs to a soul in the exercise of a true Christian 
experience. The true Christian is not a man who 
is trying painfully to pile up deeds of merit, out- 
ward work and the endurance of hardness by the 
will; neither is it his endeavor by acting on himself 
to polish and rub into lustre plausible traits of char- 
acter which may pass with men, or be offered to God 
as graces. The Christian graces are all divine. 
They are a divine birth in the soul. They borrow 
from God, and no man thinks of them as being of 
himself. And since the changes wrought in him are 
consciously not of himself, but are unfolded in him 
by the inflowing of the beauty of God, how exalted 
is the new consciousness of his mind ! To claim any- 
thing to himself would break his joy, for it is the 
very greatness and zest of his consciousness that 
whatever of right feeling, whatever graces he knows 



270 THE WORD GRACE REVIVED 

within, are the lustrous images of grace and shill- 
ings of the countenance of God. 

This was the feeling that so filled the Scripture 
with this word. It was because the heart and the 
life and the world itself were full of it. The dis- 
ciples lived upon it and grew up into it. This was 
their strength, their courage, their freedom, their 
hope in dark hours, the sweetener of their pains, the 
light that gilded their sorrows, — the grace of God. 
In it they travelled and rested and taught and 
learned. It kept off their temptations, turned their 
passions, set them above their enemies, raised them 
above themselves, made them a brotherhood of joy 
to each other, and wove into their once evil and cor- 
rupted spirits traits correspondent with the divine, 
graces which to them were the true riches of God 
and the highest gifts they knew. Therefore they 
talked, communed, testified and sang of the grace of 
God. The dearest thing they could wish for a 
friend when parting was not health or prosperity, 
but this — the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ; for in 
this they saw heaven hanging over him as a sky of 
love to keep him in good and joy. They opened 
their Christian epistles always with the salutation, 
" Grace, mercy and peace from God the Father and 
the Lord Jesus Christ,'' and with a like salutation 
the letter was closed. And when the dying saint 
was parting from his friend, the father from his son, 
the mother from her child, — in that hour when love 
gathers up all its tenderness to breathe it forth in 
a blessing that comprehends all good, this only sim- 
ple wish was spoken: " Grace be with you." 



THE DOCTEmE OF PEAYER* 

Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, 
that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time 
of need.— Heb. iv. 16. 



I will only bring to your notice the single fact of 
a remarkable agreement between the historic life 
of Christ and the institution of prayer, a fact not 
commonly observed. What God is and will be to 
man is accurately shown, of course, by the incar- 
nate life and ministry of Jesus. And here first of 
all we are deeply touched by the feeling of brother- 
hood in which he comes. His descent to the lowly, 
his perfect attention to all that seek him, his full 
compassions open to all sickness and sorrow, his pa- 
tience with wrong, his outgoing sympathy and help, 
even down to the hem of his garment, all to recover 
a world in sin — here we love to say is the true great- 
ness of Jesus, a most worthy and sublime expression 
of the greatness of God. We think of God thus re- 
vealed, not as an abstraction or some cold, far-off, 
theoretic immensity of absolute power, but as a liv- 
ing person in the sweetest, dearest terms of charity 
and friendship, faithful, attentive, tender and nigh. 
And this exactly is the doctrine of prayer. In this 

* Extracts from a sermon preached in North Church, Hartford, 
October, 1865. 

271 



272 THE DOCTRINE 

tender of the riglit of prayer we have the same at- 
tention to each want and sorrow, the same personal 
care and consideration, the same uplifting help, the 
same outgoing love to weakness and wrong. Given 
the fact of Christ, the doctrine of prayer follows of 
course, and the honors we pay to one ought to cer- 
tify us also of the other. Either Christ is no true 
manifestation of God, or else God is the God of 
prayer. And therefore it is that Christ affirms, 
many times over, a fixed relation between himself 
and prayer, such that prayer is forever certified by 
him. 

And then, to give you a clear confidence of ap- 
proach, he gives his Holy Spirit to help you and 
draw your mind into the best things. He wants 
your prayer so much and bows to it in such tender- 
ness that he will even fashion it himself; even as 
some qualified counsellor might help you frame a 
petition for the state according to the laws of the 
state. " Likewise also the Spirit helpeth our in- 
firmities; for we know not what we should pray for 
as we ought, but the Spirit maketh intercession for 
us with groanings that cannot be uttered " — liter- 
ally, " groanings inaudible,'' that is, back of the 
prayer we make. All great and strong prayer is 
prayer therefore in the Spirit. It mounts into faith 
because the Spirit certifies it by his sanction and lifts 
it by his impulse. All doubts therefore about our 
petitions will be more and more completely sur- 
mounted, and we shall get a kind of divine skill, 
more and more perfect, in asking only for things 
according to the will of God. 



OF PRAYER 273 

The prayer is wanted to put us in a fit condition 
for receiving the thing prayed for. Our state 
without the prayer might even be such as to for- 
bid the gift and make it hurtful. Besides, it 
is not so much the gifts that we want, after all, 
as an open relation to God himself; to get ac- 
quainted with him in a way of reciprocal action, 
finding him and being found of him, in a dialogue 
with him, so to speak, of petition and answer. In 
the persistent strain of earnest prayer, too, we get 
our motives purified and are drawn to a more affec- 
tionate trust. And then as we are drawn closer to 
God ourselves, we are also drawn closer to one an- 
other, when uniting two or three or many in the 
same struggle of petition; and so the intensest, 
broadest, holiest kind of brotherhood is established. 
And yet again, as we pray for others who never 
pray for themselves, our love to them is drawn out 
as it otherwise never could be, kindled as it were by 
God's love, and they in turn are impressed by the 
love that is so fervently revealed in prayers in their 
behalf, and are drawn to pray for themselves. The 
whole institute and economy of prayer is in this man- 
ner sure to have a practical working. Were God 
to give the gifts prayed for of his own motion, with- 
out prayer, there would scarcely be any practical 
working left. We should be forgiven without ask- 
ing for it, receive our gifts when our backs are 
turned, and use them without thanks. They would 
come when, having no fitness to our state, they 
would only do us harm. We should plough along 
under them just as we do under causes, without faith 



274 THE DOCTRINE 

or feeling, learning no approach to God and trained 
to no practical acquaintance with him. Everything, 
in short, by which Christ in his gospel now works 
for the renovation of souls and a general kingship 
and brotherhood in them, would be wanting. So 
deep and solid and profoundly beneficent is God's 
counsel in his institute of prayer. We want the con- 
dition of prayer just as much as we do God himself 
and for the same reason. 

Again, it is a great point as regards successful 
prayer that we truly want and fixedly mean the 
things prayed for. " Ye shall seek me and shall find 
me if ye search for me with all your heart." How 
often do men pray by their lives directly against 
what they supplicate in words, desiring, it is proved, 
what actually hinders their petitions more than they 
want what their petitions ask — the conversion for 
example of a child or a friend, when their own 
chosen mode of life is the chief obstacle in fact to 
such conversion; or, perhaps, that God will correct 
their consciously increasing greediness of gain, when 
to do it he would even have to turn back all their 
successes and strip them of all the gains they have 
made. Do they in such cases really want the things 
they dare in pious words to ask? A son, it may be, 
is going fatally astray, and nothing will save him but 
to revolutionize the whole life of his praying father 
and take him quite away from his most cherished 
pleasures. Do we really want the things we ask? 
If we mean to more than play with words we must 
come to this. 'No prayer takes hold of God until it 
first takes hold of the man. He must mean it. And 



OF PRAYER 275 

if it is for some blessing on another, he must be so 
deep in the meaning of what he prays for as to be 
bowed in heavy burden before God. His oppressed 
feeling, his almost agony in the prayer, may even be 
the necessary argument with God and a good part 
of the reason for which his prayer is heard. 

It is another important condition of successful 
prayer that we pray much; for in that manner only 
do we get skill in prayer. An old, thoroughly prac- 
tised Christian learns how to approach unto God. 
God's handling of him has taught him many things: 
what to ask, when to persist, and when to desist. 
The holy skill he has gotten is like all other kinds of 
skill, experimentally obtained. And here is one of 
the chief reasons why there is so little success in 
prayer; we do not pray enough to get the manner. 
We only bungle in it, and therefore fail. 

Once more it requires a very high kind of life, a 
practised way of purity, a close and tender walk with 
God, to be at all successful in the highest offices of 
prayer. The motives must be purified and become 
habitually unselfish, ambition must be taken away, 
humility must be graded down to a level of meek- 
ness, the love must be sweetened by a Christly walk, 
the vehemence of will and passion must be chast- 
ened, and, above all, the faith must be so brought 
up into God's secret as to abide there. Let us not 
wonder, my brethren, if our prayers are weak and 
fruitless ; how can they be otherwise, without living 
a holier life and abiding more closely with God? 

Probably there are among you such as never pray. 
God has given you for so many years this wonderful 



276 THE DOCTRINE OF PRAYER 

right of petition, but you have never accepted or 
even thought of it as your privilege. Often are you 
conscious that you want mercy and grace to help, 
but you have not been willing as yet to ask it. What 
a fact is this, that the wise good God and Father of 
our Lord Jesus Christ offers you converse, free ap- 
proach, close acquaintance, powerful help, and you 
are not drawn to so much as speak with him! O, 
the loss! — loss of dignity, greatness of feeling, help 
out of evil up into God, society with the highest, 
enduement of peace and power! 

Here is the true spring of life and fertility for us, 
and the waters of this spring are free. Wanting 
grace to help, we can have it always, grace upon 
grace, for the throne is a throne of grace. To be 
in the Spirit, high in the Spirit, filled with the Spirit, 
endued in that manner with power, is God's absolute 
gift, never withheld from those who seek it. And 
then all sorts of fruit will follow. There will be no 
barren prayers or barren years, no pinings, condol- 
ings, objurgations, decays, or desertions. Our cour- 
age will be equal to our duties, our brotherhood will 
grow like a tree that is planted by living waters, and 
our peace itself will be like a river. 

Note. — The reader will find in the "Life and Letters of 
Horace Bushnell ' ' (now published by Messrs. Charles 
Scribner's Sons), page 524, some notes on *'Ways of 
Prayer, ' ' which gather up and pack into brief and sugges- 
tive sentences all and more than all the wisdom and expe- 
rience to be found in his more studied treatises on this 
subject. 



THE MEAMNG OF THE SUPPER* 

The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not the com- 
munion of the blood of Christ ? The bread which we break, 
is it not the communion of the body of Christ? — 1 CoR. 
X. 16. 



It is not, as we have said, that the Supper is a 
merely commemorative or moral rite, though doubt- 
less it is both. Neither is it exactly that the Holy 
Spirit, as Calvin intimates, makes an effectual trans- 
lation or transference of the body of Christ, bring- 
ing it down to us to be in effect partaken, though we 
do not see it. He says, ^^ It may seem incredible 
indeed that the flesh of Christ should reach us from 
such immense local distance so as to become our 
food, but we must remember how far the secret pow- 
er of the Holy Spirit transcends all our senses, and 
what folly it must ever be to think of reducing this 
immensity to our measure." Under this very clumsy 
conception he holds, it seems to me, a most real and 
momentous truth, but which taken in this form is a 
little revolting, and to most persons scarcely more 
credible than the transubstantiation of Rome or the 
consubstantiation of Luther. 

The better conception seems to be this, and this I 

* Extracts from a sermon preached in the North Church, Hart- 
ford, June, 1849. 

S77 



278 THE MEANING 

suppose is the real meaning of his doctrine. We 
take the terms body and blood as names, comprehen- 
sively, of the Lord's earthly life and passion, names 
of the crucified humanity of Jesus and of all the 
divine works and mercies of his person — as God thus 
manifest in the flesh. Then the doctrine of the Sup- 
per is that Christ is present in it as in body and 
blood, present in all the humanities of his life and 
death, so that if we have faith to discern him there 
we shall discern him and feed upon his fulness 
unto everlasting life. 

First, we do not simply find the presence there of 
God, under the general, abstract, cold and almost 
impossible conception of omnipresence, but we find 
the presence of God as humanized in the passion of 
Jesus, and a Saviour too as manifested in the passion 
of Jesus, the body and blood of his cross, accommo- 
dated to our very mind and feeling, offered to us in 
the guise of a friend and a brother. 

Secondly, we receive the elements, not as we 
might receive a hymn-book, or some other aid or in- 
strument of worship, but we receive them as pledges 
of a special presence, which if we believe we shall 
discern and have, even that most real of all real pres- 
ences, the Christ of God. 

Thirdly, we feed upon him; the communion we re- 
ceive of his body and blood is the communion of his 
truth, love, patience, gentleness, self-sacrifice, all 
which the human of his person could hold of the di- 
vine. He is not simply offered to thought, for 
thought is slow, feeble and able to grasp only mere 
particles of things; but we have him in a way more 



OF THE SUPPER 279 

immediate than thought, we feed upon him. He 
comes into our deep sympathies back of all our 
mere thinking, to be assimilated in us secretly as 
food is assimilated in our bodies. We have him by 
faith, which is the same as to say that we have the 
whole Christ in us at once, life, passion, resurrec- 
tion, wisdom, righteousness, sanctification and re- 
demption, the fulness of the Godhead bodily. 

Discerning this presence, we commune with him 
and with each other. We are one, one in life, as un- 
der Adam we are one in death. It is not that we are 
one as being united to Christ's mere body, or that we 
feed upon Christ's mere body. The terms body and 
blood are taken, as I just said, for the whole Christ 
of God, life, love, sacrifice, God in the human. Our 
whole nature, feeding on the whole nature of Christ 
here present, offered and pledged to faith, is to live. 
Soul and body are to live. All the ruins of sin are 
to be repaired. We shall have him as the resurrec- 
tion and the life, according to his own promise. And 
so his gracious words shall be verified in all their 
fulness. ^' Whoso eateth my flesh and drinketh 
my blood hath eternal life, and I will raise him up 
at the last day. As the living Father hath sent me 
and I live by the Father, so he that eateth me, even 
he shall live by me." 

It only remains to show you in what manner you 
are to approach this rite, so as to receive most ef- 
fectually its power and practical import. Doubtless 
you are to come as to a remembrance of Christ, come 
as to the altar of penitence to receive the remission of 
sins, come to pledge your vow of new obedience^ 



280 THE MEANING OF THE SUPPER 

come to be affected by the love and passion of your 
Lord, come to unfold a common love with his peo- 
ple, and as to a feast of communion. But there is 
one simple, central object which includes all these 
and more. Come to meet the real presence of 
Christ, come in faith to discern him, and you shall 
find him here as he was in the sacred hours of his 
passion. He will manifest himself to you here. 
The Supper is itself a pledge that he will. To these 
elements that represent his body and blood he links 
himself, as really as to the body and blood of his 
human person. So that when you come to them you 
may know that the Christ of Calvary is specially of- 
fered to you here as nowhere else. This is the glory 
of the Supper. 



DEATH A LEVELLER OF DISTmCTIOISrS* 

All go unto one place ; all are of the dust, and all turn 
to dust again. — Eccles. iii. 20. 

In the drama that we call life, we begin as being, 
all alike, simply living and breathing creatures. We 
utter the same faint cry. We feed upon the same 
food without distinction of seasoning or quality. The 
most careful inspection finds nothing in us but the 
same helplessness, neither genius, nor riches, nor 
power, nor show, — even royal blood is only blood, no 
more. But, from the moment of the dressing on- 
ward, life is a putting forth and personating of dis- 
tinctions. Some are put upon us by inheritance. 
Some we make for ourselves. And this in great 
measure is the game of life itself, to become higher 
and other, to achieve some kind of distinction, 
money, show, station, repute, power, victory. Such 
is the struggle and tendency of life, that we burst 
up out of the level of infancy into conditions and 
forms of distinction endlessly and widely varied. 
And so influenced are we in this tendency by our 
pride and the unbrotherly ambition of our sin that 
we value life almost wholly in and for its distinctions. 
Fortune, success, achievement, felicity in whatever 

* Extracts from a sermon preached in the North Church, Hart- 
ford, August, 1850. 

281 



282 DEATH A LEVELLER 

form, these are desired and praised as good, chiefly 
because of the distinction they create for us, or be- 
cause thej make us other than ourselves and other 
than some or all who are about us. And then, as the 
drama closes, we drop again to the same level. The 
■undressing of the last hour takes off all our distinc- 
tions and sends us down again, rich and poor, hon- 
ored and dishonored, strong and weak, to the unam- 
bitious commonalty of the grave. All go unto one 
place, all are of dust, and all turn to dust again. 

Death, as I have shown you, throws contempt on 
all the outward distinctions. But there are distinc- 
tions that death cannot reach and will not level, the 
distinctions of faith and worth and character and 
duty. O that men could look away from the vanities 
that fool them and behold the magnificence of relig- 
ion! This no fear of death can visit or annoy. This 
ends not in the dust. Whatever distinctions are 
raised by this belong to the soul itself, and with it 
are eternal. There is honor, glory, immortality. 
The pleasures of this abide. ISTo storms of severity 
or want or contempt can embitter the pleasures of a 
right and holy mind. Character is a glory and dis- 
tinction that all may aspire to, and is more secure 
the higher the attainment. To abide in God and be 
one with him is a wealth that suffers no regrets, a 
splendor within that no earthly depression can dim. 
We are not wrong in seeking distinctions. God has 
set it in our natures to be aspiring. We only mock 
our nature by aspiring and toiling after that which 



OF DISTINCTIONS 283 

cannot profit. And then he sends us death as a mes- 
senger to correct our madness, points us to the dust 
and says, There is the end of your vanities. Striv- 
ing one against another, one to be above another, 
burning in envies, rasped by mortifications, swelling 
in pride, glittering in show — there to-morrow you 
shall meet. Cease, O man, from these and turn thy- 
self to the holy distinctions of duty and eternity. 
There are distinctions for all, honors outshining the 
brightness of the firmament, gifts of God that are 
not the ornaments of mortal vanity. Truth, duty, 
purity, love, beneficence, God manifest within, union 
to the nature of God itself, — these are the riches, the 
distinctions of the soul. These let us accept, and for 
these let us live. " Blessed be the God and Father 
of our Lord Jesus Christ, which according to his 
abundant mercy hath begotten us again unto a live- 
ly hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the 
dead, to an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled, 
and that fadeth not away." 



DEATH ABOLISHED* 
Who hath abolished death.— 2 Tim. i. 10. 

How mightily is the aspect of death changed by 
the simple passion of our Lord! Lie shows us there 
the eternally sovereign power of goodness, and we 
see how weak death is, when it comes to lay its hand 
upon goodness. We say, speaking historically, that 
Christ died. And yet there seems, after all, to have 
been no death in the case. The terror and shrinking 
and grasping after life are not here. Death is only 
taken into the employ of goodness, and so is made to 
serve where it used to reign. Captivity is taken cap- 
tive by this cross. Through Christ's death upon it 
he had the power of death destroyed, visibly abol- 
ished, i^or after the sight of such a transaction as 
the death of Christ can we look upon death as the 
terrible monster he was before. He is tame before 
love, a slave that is given to wait upon the good and 
open the gates of victory and life before them. 

Again Christ, by his doctrine and by his ascen- 
sion to the right hand of the Father, has opened to 
us another and a higher state of being, so that death 
is no more a realm of silence and detention, but a 

* Extracts from a sermon preached in the North Church, Hart- 
ford, September, 1849. 

284 



DEATH ABOLISHED 285 

gate simply of transition. Death becomes twin 
brother of Hope, one opening to us the prospect of 
glory, the other opening the way. Nothing is so 
hopeful to the true Christian, nothing so inspiriting 
and animating as the scenes that are opened to his 
faith by our Saviour in the life to come. That only 
is true life to him, and death is but the entering into 
life. This life is transitional, questionable, that is 
life eternal. All that is gloomy, therefore, and dark 
and repulsive and terrible in death and the grave is 
overspread with light. Our faith looks above, be- 
yond, — ^the evidence itself of things not seen and the 
substance of things hoped for. 

Besides, it is another proof of the abolishment of 
death by Christ, that what remains to be called 
death, namely, the cessation of the body, is shown to 
be only the closing or completing act of redemption 
itself. The death we speak of is even called by an 
apostle the redemption of the body, that unclothing 
which is needful to the full clothing upon, that put- 
ting off of the earthly and corrupt which is needful 
to the putting on of the heavenly and the incorrupti- 
ble. The process of spiritual redemption could not 
regenerate the body. The body would still be under 
death because of sin, though the spirit be life be- 
cause of righteousness. Therefore death shall have 
it, but in having it shall only become an instrument 
of redemption. That which sin hath marred beyond 
mending shall be let go and replaced, and so mortal- 
ity shall be swallowed up of life — so death is gain. 
In this view death is even seen to be converted under 
the gospel and transformed into a friendly power. 



286 DEATH ABOLISHED 

How different is Christianity when viewed in this 
light from all other known religions, how clearly em- 
inent above them all. This is the only religion that 
has been able to grapple with death and bring it un- 
der mastery. Of no other can it be said that it has 
abolished, or even midertaken to abolish, death. If 
there be something of poetry in the notions of death 
that are offered in other religions, or something of 
philosophy, if they play gracefully about our imag- 
ination or offer bold conceptions to our understand- 
ing, yet they are still only fungi that grow out of 
the body of death, yew-trees that are rooted in men's 
graves. They belong to a world of death, they bring 
no power of life or deliverance. It may be some- 
thing to a human creature with his immortal instincts 
to believe that he shall be a great hunter in the world 
of spirits, or that he shall drink wine from the skull 
of his enemy in the halls of Odin, or that he shall be 
ferried as a ghost underground across the Styx to the 
Elysian Fields, paying due toll to the ghostly ferry- 
man; something that he shall live again on earth 
though it be as the soul of a beast, something to fall 
into Brahma and become a part of him, and be 
drugged with him in that delicious sleep from which 
he never wakes. But to be pure, a partaker of good- 
ness and divinity even to the full, to rise out of the 
body as a being wholly glorious and immortal, and 
to have during all one's life of faith on earth a new 
consciousness certified of this, and to live ever in 
prospect of an issue so triumphant, — this is Chris- 
tianity abolishing death and bringing life and im- 
mortality to light. In this eminence of Christ, in 



DEATH ABOLISHED 287 

this sublime adequacy to our want, is the truly divine 
authorship of his gospel most signally proved. 

JSTeither let us overlook the comforts given to us 
here in our days of mourning and the sorrow by 
which we are afflicted in the death of our friends. If 
they lived in Christ they did not die, they have only 
emerged into a livelier life. What we call their 
death is death to us but no death to them. It was 
only their unclothing, their entering into life, their 
transition to the incorruptible where God abides in 
complete fulness of life. And if the consciousness 
of God is quickened also in you, how slender a space 
for grief and separation is left for death to occupy. 
There is, to us who believe, a light that pierces the 
grave and opens worlds beyond. We follow our 
friends who die, we see them entering into life, per- 
fect, pure, separated from pain, decrepitude and all 
sin's poisons. We see them emerging out of this 
world's wants and tears into the fulness and com- 
plete liberty of just men made perfect. They are 
not in the grave, they are not hid from us. They 
are only a day's journey ahead of us; we may see 
them now just passing the horizon of our day. We 
shall be with them to-morrow, all in life together. 

The life that Christ has given us we freely yield 
to him. We testify our faith in him. We find our 
eternity in him. We invite him to reign within us 
by his all-renovating power, till we live in every 
member. We anticipate with confidence what our 
eyes cannot see, but what is most real to our faith, 
a state of purity with him, and of youth and of glori- 
fied energy, fitly described only by the words Eternal 
Life. 



GOD'S meaot:n^g in peobation^* 

And this he said to prove him, for he himself knew 
what he would do. — John vi. 6. 

Our present state of life we familiarly call a state 
of probation. But, like many of the truths most 
commonly accepted, what we call the state of proba- 
tion appears to be quite inadequately or even falsely 
conceived. It appears to be the feeling of many 
that God appoints the state of probation, not for any 
discernible use or necessary benefit to us, but simply 
as being determined not to give us the blessed or good 
state save as we first groan for it or go through the 
fire to reach it. They have it as a kind of tacit as- 
sumption that he might just as well have taken us 
directly into the state of blessedness and glory, but 
that he preferred in his sovereign right to make us 
run the gauntlet for it. We are tried accordingly 
much as a bar of steel is tried, not to make the bar 
stronger but simply to see whether it will break, 
whether it can stand the strain or not. 

But the proving instituted for mankind has cer- 
tainly no such meaning or object. It is more like 
the Saviour's proving of Philip in the matter of feed- 
ing the multitude. It was not simply to put him to 

* Extracts from a sermon preached in the North Church, Hart- 
ford, May, 1851. 



GOD'S MEANING IN PROBATION 289 

the test, as he was, and prove what was in him, for 
he himself knew what he would do already, but it 
was to prove him in the sense of putting him in exer- 
cise or training, so to establish his faith and make 
him stronger, to show him, as he goes on to feed the 
multitude without bread, what resources are to be 
at his command when he will do any good thing 
trusting God for help, putting him thus in a position 
of experimental trust and assurance. It was, in a 
word, to form and consolidate character in him. 

So of probation in the more general sense, as the 
appointed office of life. It is not the proving of 
steel, just to find whether it will break, but it is more 
like the process of the furnace by which iron is re- 
fined and converted into steel, or like the process of 
heating and cooling by which steel, after it is made, 
is tempered so as to become duly elastic or capable 
of sustaining the sharp cutting edge desired in any 
tool or instrument. Hence apart from what is 
called probation or previous to it, man is to be 
looked upon as an incomplete or not completely fin- 
ished creature, iron not yet converted into steel, or 
steel not hardened and tempered to its uses. And 
this is the object of his probation; it is not to break 
him if he will break, but it is to strengthen him final- 
ly that he may never break. It is to make him what 
as yet he is not, to carry him on beyond the state of 
raw being and perfect him in a character. For what 
we call character is not created in man and could not 
be. It is in its way nature, that which comes after 
creation, that which is formed in the being, created as 
the result of his own free exercise or choice under 



290 GOD'S MEANING 

God's helping and correcting operations working 
within. He may be well and exactly made, made in 
the nicest harmony of parts and the sweetest balance 
of his natural impulses, but neither parts nor im- 
pulses are a character, least of all an established and 
morally complete character. That can appear only 
as the result of an exercise or trial such as we de- 
scribe in the word probation. 

Exactly this we see in the history of the first man 
himself. Considered as being simply made, he is a 
perfect structure, having all his parts in a balance of 
harmony, opening to goodness and God as a flower 
to the morning light. He is yet, with all his happy 
and pure inclinations, unestablished in anything 
happy and pure. ]^othing good is confirmed in him 
or set on a footing above temptation. He has no 
experience and, so far, no character grounded in ex- 
perience. He is curious and wants to know the un- 
known. He wants even to know disobedience, and 
has no sufiicient countercheck of bitter experience 
to keep him from the trial of it. He knows it is 
wrong in the principle, but the pains, the necessary 
hell of wrong that will be its effects, the knowing 
good and evil, is a mystery to him. Therefore with 
all his high native instincts, as created in the image 
of God, he is practically weak, a beautiful and glori- 
ous creature, but still weak as a character. He looks 
on the captivating tree, wonders what is there, craves 
the forbidden evil and finally says, I must know what 
it is. Thus he falls. 

Hence the necessity that we should go through 
just such a state of trial and exercise as the present. 



IN PROBATION 291 

For the state called heaven is not a condition of raw 
being, however gloriously made, but it is the state of 
character established and perfected by exercise, that 
is by the knowledge of good and evil, in which knowl- 
edge the choices are forever settled. Set fast thus 
in an eternal and fixed choice of good, he is no more 
tempted by the want of knowledge, for he knows too 
much to be tempted. He is now in character forever 
and can never again fall out of it, ready thus to ful- 
fil every condition necessary to a perfect society, or 
a socially perfect felicity. 

Here then it is that we open the true conception 
of human life as a process of probation, and we shall 
see it to be one so magnificently prepared, and car- 
ried on with so great solemnity and constancy and a 
pressure of movement so sublime, as may fitly put 
us in awe both of God and of ourselves. 

It was this indeed that so profoundly impressed 
the feeling of Job and threw him into a maze so be- 
wildering. God's meaning in life, — he could see but 
a little way into it, yet far enough in to show him 
that God works tenderly in it and with some fearful- 
ly grand purpose. It is not as if God were proving 
us down, but as if he were proving us up, training 
us, lifting us into some glorious consummation, dear 
to him as it is significant to us. Quite lost in the 
mystery, he exclaims: ^^ What is man that thou 
shouldest magnify him, and that thou shouldest set 
thine heart upon him, and that thou shouldest visit 
him every morning and try him every moment! " 
This trying, training, proving, — it is going on he 
sees all the while everywhere, and it is to him as if 



292 GOD'S MEANING 

God came every morning to watch for the progress 
made. 

Taking now this view of probation or the problem 
it solves, let us note some of the points involved. 

1. The preparation. It required the very world 
itself to be built in a manner to serve this purpose. 
It must be such a world as will take an order of creat- 
ures in the state of raw being, and be a mill of exer- 
cise for them, such as will unfold their powers and 
carry them on toward a state of spiritual maturity 
and established oneness with God. As the state of 
raw being is for every man, at the beginning, a state 
without knowledge, the world must be such a prepa- 
ration as working on the mere capacity of knowledge 
will bring us forward into a knowledge of God and 
of ourselves, of principle, of the pains, prostrations 
and terrible thraldom of sin, of the joys of purity, 
and of a future state of eternal well or ill being. 
Hence the signature of God must be upon all its ob- 
jects, the heavens declaring his glory, the things that 
are made revealing the invisible things of God and 
causing them to be clearly seen. The created world 
must be a school, whose ceiling overhead and whose 
walls on every side are covered over with characters 
of good and works of the Great Intelligence. 

2. The body also must be an organ both of action 
and of passion exactly fitted to the exercise of the 
soul, such an organ as will apprise it continually of 
the true nature and quality of its actions and keep it 
in a process of self -disco very. It must have just 
those wants and be capable of just those doings, good 
and bad, that will best serve the exercise of the spir- 



IN PROBATION 293 

itual nature. It must be under laws of health and 
joy, of pain, corruption, dislocation and death, such 
as will connect virtue with its reward, evil done with 
evil suffered, wrong with fear, pride with chastise- 
ment, recklessness with disaster. 

Thus the whole material state, up to the heavens 
and down to the lowest caverns of being under us, 
all laws and agencies and objects, must be arranged 
just as they now are to unfold the knowledge and 
thought of what is good, to reveal the bitterness and 
curse of evil, and so to promote that glorious end 
which is the purpose of the Almighty. 

Observe the implication that God, preparing such 
a trial for character's sake, must needs allow that 
freedom which is the necessary condition of charac- 
ter, and consent beforehand to all the dreadful mis- 
chances of such freedom, that is, to the existence of 
sin with all its incapacitating effects, its disgusts, its 
wrongs, its pains and the horrible chaos of anarchy 
it brings with it, and the woes of a possibly final de- 
struction it draws after it. Of course the sin with 
its woes will not be chargeable to him, for he will set 
all the influences and safeguards possible on the side 
of order and obedience. But the subjects themselves 
will assuredly not be restrained from the bad experi- 
ment of sin, and will let loose all these miseries in 
themselves and their children. Still God has under- 
taken for character, and not for any sweet confec- 
tions or delicacies of pleasure. Therefore he or- 
dains probation, come what will of calamity with it, 
or with the freedom that is put in training by it. 
With a resolute sovereignty he undertakes to bring 



294 GOD'S MEANING 

us through a trial, fully worth to us and also to him 
all the disorders and pains it will cost. The trial 
will be vast and perilous and linked with trouble; 
still the woes and disasters will not be of his crea- 
tion, nothing will be his but the liberty instituted 
and the care he takes to bring it up into character 
and glory. 

3. Consider for another point the immense expen- 
diture it will cost him to go on with the plan and 
make the probation beneficent. It is very common 
to hear Adam spoken of as having been put on pro- 
bation, as if to test his righteousness, and that when 
it broke down the probation was ended. As if God 
wanted to prove him in order to know him, when he 
knew in fact as well before as after just what he 
would do. Stra*nge weakness it is that we can nar- 
row down God's great and broad designs of love to 
such mere nothings of significance ! 'No, we are not 
proved in God's view when we are fallen, but only 
just begun to be. To him we are never sufiiciently 
proved till we are approved. Redemption is no 
afterthought of probation, but an essential, integral 
part of it. As the plan is to be one of loss and catas- 
trophe and terrible expense to us, so God consents" 
to go down with us into the struggle and unite his 
own loss and heavy expenditure, that he may bring 
us safely through. He will not only put us to the 
proof, but will let us prove him also. With our 
struggle begins a more tremendous struggle on his 
part, a struggle of patience and agony and secret 
striving, all that we discover in the cross and sacri- 
fice of Christ and the regenerating grace of the Spir- 



m PROBATION 295 

it. When he institutes probation he institutes all 
this ; for without this he has no thought of any result 
possible that answers the beneficence of his design. 
Instead, therefore, of discovering how little and low 
he makes us when he puts us to the trial, it is only 
here that we discover the immense interest his divine 
fatherhood takes in our final perfection. I^^owhere 
else do we ask in such amazement what high thoughts 
our God must have concerning us. " What is man 
that thou shouldest magnify him, and that thou 
shouldest set thine heart upon him, and that thou 
shouldest visit him every morning and try him 
every moment! '' 

Accordingly there must be infinite diversities of 
wants and dangers and fears and losses and obstacles, 
necessities that cannot be escaped, sorrows that must 
be supported, works that must be done, great con- 
flicts of truth with error, great conquests of science 
and liberty and prayer and patience. In a word, the 
whole scheme of providential government, its mer- 
cies and severities, its successes and defeats, its aids 
and obstacles, must be such as to subdue the will and 
tame the pride of sin, such as to cultivate the faith 
and winnow the purity and clear the truth of the 
penitent. And this, you perceive, requires that all 
the providences and allotments of this life be set in 
the nicest relation of correspondence with the grand 
work of probation that is going on. 

Observe the constancy and variety of the trial. It 
never stops, any more than the stars do. It is like 
the mind itself, which has no power to stop, but is 
imder a doom of action. So this work goes on, re- 



296 GOD'S MEANING 

newed every morning and varied every moment. 
The temptations, afflictions, feelings, wants and 
works of life are continually changing, and we never 
stand at the same point in anything for two succes- 
sive moments, any more than a river on its way to 
the sea. At one moment the trial is hard and dry, 
at another fierce and searching, at another gentle 
and persuasive, at another irritating or seductive, 
agreeable or frightful. We are sent forward and 
backward. In this manner we are thrust into the 
sense of principles, awakened to the want of them, 
turned toward God as the only true object of the 
soul, corrected in our errors, startled out of our se- 
curities and hidings; and so the work goes on, still 
on, allowing no cessation unless it be the cessation 
of sleep. Indeed there is nothing that we experience, 
from our first breath to our last, that does not enter 
into our character and make its mark upon us, a mark 
that may be smoothed or varied but can never be ut- 
terly effaced. And God is ever watching his process 
with us, and varying his discipline to mould us to 
himself, that nothing may be wanting to the com- 
pleteness and the happy result of our trial. 

Once more consider the effects wrought by the 
trial, where it is successful. Carried on through this 
bitter struggle of experience under sin and redemp- 
tion and brought up into established holiness, see 
how different a creature the subject will be. He is 
the same and yet another, the same in respect of 
mere substance, but another in respect of character 
and moral consciousness. He has learned what evil 
is and knows it, knows the bitterness and bondage 



IN PROBATION 297 

and even hell that it is. He has had great conflicts 
that have made him strong, and knit the fibre of his 
spirit in a durable compactness of resolve and wis- 
dom and prudence. Curiosity has learned the limits 
of intelligence. Great questions have been con- 
quered and great sins mastered and great enemies 
subdued. The man has come away out of corrup- 
tion into purity, out of the world into spirit, out of 
self into God. He knows God inwardly and is con- 
sciously exalted in that knowledge. Made to be a 
creature of God, he is now a new creature in God, 
one with God forever. 

So, if we complain of the temptations of life, 
charging our sins and falls and dishonors and broken 
purposes on the faults of our temperament, or the 
overwhelming temptations that are allowed to prey 
upon us, then how clear is it that character can be 
fortified and finished in us by no trial more delicate. 
If the oak cannot be rooted firmly without heavy 
storms, why should we ask to be made strong in 
feeble resistances and small conquests? What is a 
creature on trial for a character, but a candidate for 
temptations, a necessary subject of temptations. We 
have never one too many or too strong, unless we 
make them artificially by yielding when we ought 
to resist. Great temptations are great battles, and 
just there it is that God most honors us, by calling 
us to be heroes and waiting with us on the field to 
crown us. 

And again, if we complain that God should make 
such a race and set on foot a scheme of life so peril- 
ous, a scheme that will certainly end in such awful 



298 GOD'S MEANING 

disaster and ruin to many; or if we turn our com- 
plaint into an argument and draw it to the conclu- 
sion that such a scheme is impossible under a God 
who is infinitely good and powerful, able therefore to 
make and certain to make every creature happy; 
then I have to ask how he shall make any creature 
happy without character, and what is character but 
that which is formed in the creature himself by his 
own struggles and choices, under his own experiences 
of bitterness and temptation, such as here we suffer. 
And if God has made the very world itself, and insti- 
tuted redemption and dwelt in every soul by his 
Spirit, and turned all outward providences so as to 
serve in the exactest manner the great necessities 
of character, then I see not what infinite wisdom, 
power and goodness could have done that would be 
better. The production of character involves inher- 
ently just this amount of peril, and the only ques- 
tion was, character or no character. 

We are here impressed with a conviction of the 
uniformly serious import of life. So much is made in 
the preaching of the gospel of the decisive import- 
ance of the change called conversion or regeneration, 
that many persons I believe are accustomed to look 
on nothing done or suffered as having any great con- 
sequence, save as it is immediately connected with 
this. But the truth is that everything, however re- 
mote, has a real and intimate connection with it. 
Often the final rejection of the grace of God 
at the critical point of to-day was decided by 
the casting out of a principle, or the initiation of a 
vice, or the indulgence of a temporizing habit, or 



IN PROBATION 299 

the scorn of a holy truth, or the yielding to evil 
company, twenty years ago. The life, in fact, is all 
one from beginning to end, and the work of proba- 
tion is going on at every point. The crisis of con- 
version or no conversion, life or death, is only a 
point where all other points come to their issue, and 
settle their account of working. God is visiting us 
every morning and trying us every moment, and the 
work never stops. The most fatal points are passed, 
not seldom, in a condition of silence and quiet, when 
we have no suspicion awakened of what we are do- 
ing — so critical is the trial and so deep in good or 
evil at every turn of it. Come as it will, in pros- 
perity or pleasure or hope or loss or affliction or pas- 
sion or dulness, all the turns of it take hold of our 
character and through that of our eternity. 

It becomes a very serious question with every per- 
son, child or man, at the precise point where he is, 
what he has done. What is the result thus far exe- 
cuted or wrought in him? . . . Every man is 
met by the very appalling question, " Where am I 
now? What is the character wrought in me under 
the discipline of God in my life? God has led me 
on thus and thus. Much have I seen, much have I 
done, much have I suffered. I have lived in a world 
of works and deaths and sins and sharp convictions 
and multiplied mercies. God has spoken to me often 
from the cross of his Son and called me inwardly by 
the voice of his Spirit, and now what have I re- 
ceived? " O, what a question is this for any human 
being to ask! How much does it include, how far 
does it reach ! Yery soon all that concerns the issue 



300 GOD'S MEANING IN PROBATION 

of your trial will be decided. Possibly it is decided 
now. What, then, is the result to which you have 
come by so many or few years of trial? Is the root 
of a blessed and great character in you? 

O, how lightly do most of us think of this mortal 
state, how little conceive its true errand and object, 
the lofty spirituality of its designs and the abiding, 
unchangeable permanence of its results ! But if you 
can take the Christian idea and receive the Christian 
promise, ^^ Him that overcometh will I make a pillar 
in the temple of my God,'' then how magnificent a 
thing will it have been to you to live. Then every- 
thing you do, see, suffer is great. But if you cannot 
accept God's design or take God's meaning, if you 
sleep, if you forget your errand, if you will not 
learn wisdom, if you cannot come unto God, still 
your trial must go on and the end must be as you 
make it. 



THE GEEAT TIME-KEEPEE * 

And let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, 
and years. — Gen. i. 14. 

The system of the universe has two great features 
or elements of contrariety, which are made to sub- 
sist together in beautiful order and harmony. It 
is on the one hand a system of the most perfect sta- 
bility, in which all the parts stand firm from age to 
age, accomplishing their daily revolutions with such 
undeviating exactness that science will foretell their 
places for millions of years. On the other hand, it 
is a system of ever-circling changes, in which the 
days and nights, the seasons and the years, are fly- 
ing round and round us in quick succession. 

Now God might have made a universe so as to 
exhibit nothing but permanence and stability, a mo- 
tionless universe, in which all the parts should stand 
still on their centre of rest, without any variety of 
times or seasons. Or, adopting our present solar 
system, if he had introduced only some very slight 
modifications in the position and motions of our 
planet, the system would have been as regards us a 
system without times and seasons, and probably we 
should never have been aware of any motion in it. 

* Extracts from a sermon in the American National Preacher^ 
January, 1844. 

^ 301 



302 THE GREAT TIME-KEEPER 

Summer, autumn, winter, spring, completing what 
we call a year, would be unknown — we should have 
no notion of a year. One side of the earth would be 
a perpetual day, the other a perpetual night and un- 
inhabitable. We should have in fact no distinctions 
of time whatever, and no measure of time except in 
the successions of our thoughts and experiences. Life 
would stretch on, as it were, in one straight contin- 
uous road under the same never-setting noonday 
sun, from the cradle to the grave. The universe 
would be a clock without either hands or bell, and 
the wheels would roll away under their unlettered 
dial-plate as rapidly as now, measuring off to man 
the times they conceal from his knowledge. 

But God has made the very universe to be the 
clock of the universe, and admonish every mortal 
heart of the sure and constant passage of time. We 
are not left to our inward judgments. Time has its 
measures without, in the most palpable and impres- 
sive visitations of the senses. Every twilight tells 
us that a day is gone, and that by a sign as impres- 
sive as the blotting out of the sun ! It is as if we had 
a clock so adjusted as to give notice of the hour, by 
displacing at a stroke the light of heaven, suspend- 
ing the labors of the world, quenching the fevers 
of its earthly schemes and passions and diffusing an 
opiate spell of oblivion over all human consciousness. 
The impalpable odors of the spring penetrate our 
secret senses as monitors of time. The summer 
heat is the heat of time, the winter's cold is the cold 
of time — both forcing their way into our experience 
by a visitation that we cannot resist. One season 



THE GREAT TIME -KEEPER 303 

tells us that another is gone; and when the whole 
circle of seasons is completed and returned into itself, 
the new year tells us that the old is gone. And a 
certain number of these years, we know, is the ut- 
most bound of life. How sure is the reckoning! It 
is even compulsory — none can escape it. All things 
in fact swim around us and above in circling mo- 
tions, and these all are but so many measures of 
time, so many voices telling us of its flight. Our 
very business, our day's works, our pay days, the term 
of our stocks and contracts, — all are made to be im- 
possible, without reminding us that days, months, 
years are passing away and bringing us nearer to 
our eternal account. And thus you see that God has 
built the very frame of creation to warn and keep 
you warned of the flight of time. Your stay here 
was to be short, and he has thrown all things round 
you into visible transit, that you may see the time 
pass and have your eternity ever in view. 

It is another benefit of God's arrangements in the 
astronomical motions and the seasons, that he may 
call us often to a reckoning with ourselves, and that 
under the most impressive influences. Were there 
no distribution of times and seasons, no complete 
periods, we should have no past times completed to 
think of. We could never say, as the sun goes down, 
and the light fades into darkness — " Another day is 
gone ! " Or, when the year returns to its goal — 
^^ Another year is gone ! " We should only slide 
along in a silent, stealthy motion, and time would 
slide as silently by in undiscriminated periods. And 
how should we hold ourselves to a reckoning for that 



304 THE GREAT TIME-KEEPER 

which has no distinct existence in our thoughts? 
But now time reels itself away in definite measures 
and complete circles. The sun returns to his place, 
and says to all that live — I have given you now an- 
other year. The conscience hears his report, and 
says — What now have I done with this year? A 
kind of general instinct moves us to a reckoning 
with ourselves. The merchant and the banker go 
into account with themselves and foot up the results 
of the year. The husbandman computes the yield 
of his harvest. Mistakes in plan, deficiencies of in- 
dustry and attention, misapplications of effort, are 
brought into view and corrected, ^ow, too, the im- 
mortal nature speaks, and the claims of wisdom force 
themselves into view. Something within calls us to 
a reckoning. One more year of accountability to 
God is gone, and its record is sealed ! 

The arrangement of God in our distributions of 
time and season, as they impel us to a reckoning for 
the past, invite us to new purposes of future life. 
It is a fact, the causes of which I will not stay to in- 
vestigate — nevertheless it is a fact, that when we 
will begin some new undertaking or better mode of 
living we like to do it at the opening of some new 
period or term of experience; and God, to favor this 
disposition, provides for the recurrence of new pe- 
riods^ He does not measure time in straight lines 
of progress, but in circles. Every day is a complete 
circle, every year a larger complete circle. When, 
therefore, these circles return into themselves, then 
begins a new day or a new year — a day or a year 
mastained as yet, by any sin, and broken in upon as 



THE GREAT TIME-KEEPER 305 

yet, by no false plans or schemes of life. Man rises 
in the morning, and it is the morning of a new day, 
inviting him to something new and better than be- 
fore. And when the 'New Year comes, the very 
sound of the term is sanctified by associations of pu- 
rity and goodness, and we may not rashly stain it with 
evil. If you are a Christian, now is the time to un- 
dertake better things and plan a holier life. This 
year may be your last — let it be your best, a fruitful 
year, a holy year. And this day, as E'ature begins 
anew her circle of regenerated motion, do you begin 
with it a life of true wisdom. Many of you have 
long been promising that by a certain time you 
would begin a religious life. God brings out now be- 
fore you the unpolluted year and invites you to ful- 
fil your intention. He declares, if you will receive 
it, the remission of sins that are past and offers to 
begin with you anew. 

God, in the institution of the seasons, designs to 
impress it upon us as a truth of practical moment, 
that everything must be done in its time. To every- 
thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose 
under the sun. In other words, there is an exact 
time fixed in the purposes of God in which every- 
thing must be done if done at all. And God has 
kindly ordered the world itself, so as to impress this 
truth upon every man that lives. If there were no 
successions of day and night or of seasons; if all 
things had been made to stand in a given posture, 
no such lesson would have been impressed. We 
might work and trade, might plant, sow and har- 
vest any and all kinds of fruits, at any and all times. 



306 THE GREAT TIME-KEEPER 

The sluggard would never feel behind his time and 
nothing could be out of season. But instead of such 
an arrangement, God has given us day and night 
and a round of ever-changing seasons, and whatso- 
ever we do needs to be done in its time. It must 
then be done or never. The plants have all a time 
which is natural to them, and no other will answer. 
They grow, they blossom, they ripen in their ap- 
pointed time. The same universal clock-work 
which measures our time measures also theirs. And 
without observing it, we cannot even feed our bod- 
ies. If we want the light of day, we cannot have it 
in the night; and we go to our work every morn- 
ing under the commandment: Work while the 
day lasts, the night cometh when no man can work. 
The tradesman observes the seasons. The husband- 
man watches them for his life. And thus we are 
trained to the habitual conviction that whatsoever 
we do must be done in its time. So well is it under- 
stood, that one is deemed scarcely better than an 
idiot who will undertake to do or produce anything 
after the season is past. And this impression 
forced upon the outward man is designed to serve 
the benefit of the spiritual, that we may never neg- 
lect our opportunities of grace and duty. 

There are, alas! a great many Christians or pro- 
fessed disciples who design to do much good in the 
world, but the time never comes for doing it. They 
mean at length to break through all their worldly 
snares and slay all their evil habits, but the time 
never comes. But if you never find the time, my 
brethren^ for executing your good purposes, what are 



THE GREAT TIME-KEEPER 307 

the J worth? ^eed I expostulate with you concern- 
ing a folly so manifest? Were there any meaning 
in your good purposes, you would be ever seeking 
after those times and opportunities when God will 
assist you to do the good you intend; nor, if you 
sought such opportunities, could you fail to find 
them. But, alas ! these vain resolves, these ineffectual 
and sluggish longings, these good purposes never ful- 
filled, are the most treacherous and fatal instruments 
of deceit you can employ. Dismiss them forever! 
Do the good you meditate! Or, if you can never 
find the time for doing it, have the frankness to 
confess that your good intentions are hollow and 
worthless. 

It is worthy of distinct notice, that God has so or- 
dered our times and seasons as, at once, to keep us 
advised of our rapid transit, and by the same means 
also to intimate our immortality. The times and 
seasons and days and years, flying on with a swift- 
ness that portends annihilation, can yet break over 
no boundary. J^ature is ever returning into her- 
self. She does not stand waxing old without reno- 
vation ; nor does she move on a straight line of prog- 
ress, passing by landmarks never again to be seen. 
But she comes round, in ever returning circles, to be- 
gin her course anew and renovate all her decays. 
All that perishes she regenerates. Every day has 
its resurrection in the day that comes after it. Every 
year returns, in a renewed circle of months and sea- 
sons. The dying flowers come to life again, blos- 
soming out of the seeds in which they have folded 
their beauty, and the grave of the year which au- 



308 THE GREAT TIME-KEEPER 

tumn closes, the spring reopens. And thiis it is 
made to be the habit and familiar attitude of our 
minds to look for a reproduction of all that perishes, 
of our friends who die, of ourselves — a habit 
which is intellectually confirmed and sealed by reve- 
lation. Times and seasons do not kill. We see 
in death no destroyer, but the transit only of 
that circular motion which we doubt not shall 
still roll on with a renewed and ever-renewing im- 
mortality. 

The twelve who have gone from us, the last year, 
have no more perished than the twelve signs of the 
zodiac; and, as these are set by the Almighty to re- 
new their presence in the heavens, so shall they be 
ever renewing their inextinguishable life before the 
throne of God. The bands of Orion, which cannot 
be loosed, encompass them all. The infant child, 
so soon removed from life, has so soon renewed its 
being at the great fountain of immortality. The 
widowed mother's son still lives, though her heart 
breaks over his grave. The placid head of the 
worthy father who prayed with us, and handed us 
so often the cup of Christ, has only ascended to a 
new circle of regenerated youth and become a 
higher star shedding a genial and more tranquil 
light. These all — all live. And so shall all of us. 
We cannot die. Seeing, then, before us a being 
that cannot end, let every day and night and sea- 
son and year that God has ordained remind us of 
it, and hasten our preparation for the life that is to 
come. Seek ye him that maketh the seven stars 
and Orion, and turneth the shadow of death into the 



THE GREAT TIME -KEEPER 309 

morning, and maketh the day dark with night. The 
Lord is his name. 

Another impression, closely related to the one 
here described, is also forced upon us, and forms a 
natural close to these meditations. The impression, 
I mean, of some stable and changeless empire of be- 
ing, which the established round of seasons and 
years and the mechanical order of heaven itself sug- 
gests and confirms. Were there no motion of times 
and seasons, nothing but a standing posture in the 
worlds, stability, permanency itself would be scarce- 
ly more than a pause, and we might only wait for 
some unknown explosion to end it. Our idea of sta- 
bility is generated by observing how change prose- 
cutes a perpetual war, and yet cannot break the 
peace. The times and seasons fly, universal motion 
swings the orbs along, and yet the great celestial fab- 
ric as a whole rests in stable repose. The change, 
we see, reveals a stability which change cannot 
shake. Time is measured out, as it were, by eter- 
nity; and the clock of the seasons and years is the 
heaven of heavens, where God himself rests the 
basis of his throne. We do our day's works by the 
measurement Heaven gives us, and are thus in 
every transitory moment kept in sight of our home. 
JSTor is this a labored and difficult thought, which has 
no practical verity. The impression of which I 
speak is one that we all feel, however we may reason 
or neglect to reason concerning it. And, therefore, 
heaven is the word that signifies the eternity of the 
righteous. This eternal home and stable rest is the 
goal of our being. Here below all is fugitive; and 



310 THE GREAT TIME-KEEPER 

God, in the fliglit of times and seasons, is but chas- 
ing ns home to the rest for which we sigh. There 
is snch a rest, he declares, by the very signs that 
measure out our fugitive moments — a rest of 
changeless good, as firm as the everduring order of 
heaven — an inheritance that is incorruptible and un- 
defiled and that fadeth not away. 'Not could he 
ever show you the meaning of time, till he had 
shown you also this, which is the errand of time and 
the term of its flight. 



THE FOKTIFIED STATE * 

Be thou my strong habitation whereunto I may con- 
tinually resort. — Psalm Ixxi. 3. 

The Christian Church is often called the church 
militant, and the life of the Christian disciple is 
familiarly represented under the figure of a war- 
fare — a fight of faith, a taking on of the whole 
armor of God, girdle, breastplate, shield, helmet, 
sword, and a going forth in this panoply to the con- 
flict with principalities and powers. But we do not 
notice as frequently as we might, and in order to our 
true comfort and courage ought, that we are entitled 
to what is a necessary part or privilege of all war- 
fare — our fortifications, — that we are not required to 
be always out in the open field fighting hand to hand 
with our enemies. We may have our fortified camps 
or fortresses, into which we may repair and rest there 
for a time in a state inaccessible to our enemies, re- 
cruiting thus our energies, and when the respite is 
over choosing our times of march. Thus it was that 
our Psalmist, wearied in a life of toil and conflict 
with his enemies, both personal and public, prayed: 
^^ Be thou my strong habitation, whereunto I may 
continually resort." He wanted God to be the for- 

* Extracts from a sermon preached in the North Church, Hart- 
ford, May, 1854. 

311 



312 THE FORTIFIED STATE 

tress of his soul, into whom he might retire and rest 
from his conflicts. 

The force of his words cannot be fully apprehend- 
ed without adverting to a distinction of the ancient 
times, when society was itself an armed state. Pro- 
tection was not then secured by laws — law was too 
weak in the administration to afford the necessary 
security of persons and property. Men lived for 
the most part in walled cities and in castles. But 
the greater part of the population of the interior, and 
especially of the agricultural parts, were distributed 
under a class of chieftains or military nobles who in 
fact owned them as their serfs, and ruled them as 
little military nations in their own right. The chief- 
tain selected some high peak on the mountain top 
or, it may be, some sharp rock rising out of the cul- 
tivated plain, and upon this, covering the whole 
summit, he built his castle. Within this fortified en- 
closure of from one to ten acres the lord or chieftain 
lived with all his retainers about him, maintaining a 
kind of military state and keeping garrison for his 
life. Below on the plain was his great estate or 
manor, and the harvest gathered there was carried 
up into the castle and stored away in granaries to 
provide against starvation in case of an assault or 
siege. 

It resulted, of course, that so many castles armed 
to the teeth were in a state of continual war with 
each other. Fighting was, in fact, the trade of life. 
Each chieftain owned his band or little town. And 
when he wanted plunder or had suffered, as he 
thought, some insult, he led forth his troop in a wild 



THE FORTIFIED STATE 313 

sally of horsemen to desolate the fields and capture 
the cattle and workmen, or to scale and take by an 
unexpected assault some neighboring castle. The 
fighting, however, consisted mostly in forays and 
sudden attacks in the open field ; to these fights of at- 
tack or defence they went forth out of their castles, 
returning again or continually resorting to them for 
the night or when the adverse fortune of the day 
required. 

These were the strong habitations, therefore, in 
whose shelter they trusted, and it is to these that the 
Psalmist refers in my text. He feels that he cannot 
always be in the open field; that he wants some for- 
tified centre out of which he may issue and into 
which he may retire continually as he finds it neces- 
sary, to be recruited and prepared for the renewal 
of his warfare. 

What I propose, then, under my text, is to unfold 
the glorious truth suggested by it, viz., that God is 
the strong habitation, the fortress, to which all that 
are in the great warfare of life may continually re- 
sort. 

That God is the strong habitation is very obvious 
in the fact that when we come back unto him we 
ascend a summit that is inaccessible. We do not 
stay down in the plain fighting with our enemy hand 
to hand on the same level, but we go up into the 
height, whence we may look down and laugh at the 
impotence of his attacks. If we are set upon by 
wicked men who assail us with slander, if our own 
evil thoughts, our vile imaginations, our bad remem- 
brances, our lusts, our passions, rise up in fierce com- 



314 THE FORTIFIED STATE 

binations to overpower its and drive us from our in- 
tegrity, naj, if remorse and despair for the sins and 
defeats already suffered scowl upon us and we seem 
to be quite prostrated under their dark assaults, still 
we have nothing to do but to go up into God's em- 
brace and be hid, as it were, in him, and not one of 
these enemies can reach us there. God is a height 
inaccessible to them, and when we are truly raised 
to him by our faith we are lifted in such a manner 
in our range of life that we have, for the time, no 
sense of warfare, for the fightings and fears and 
temptations are left below. Almost all the strug- 
gles we have to maintain in what is called our war- 
fare take us when we are on the low ground, in the 
spaces of worldly desire and action. But when we 
are up with God, when we are in the strong habita- 
tion, these cannot reach us. We are then shut in, 
and the gate is down behind us. And there we rest, 
looking down serenely on all the temptations that 
have mocked us and the troubles and afilictions that 
have chastened us, to sing: ^^ The rock of our 
strength and our refuge is in God.'' 

O, if there were no such heights for us to ascend, 
if we must always be in the fight on a level with our 
enemies, I know not what could keep our courage 
up. It is nothing but this dear, blessed truth that 
we can sometimes get above the world and sit down 
in the heavenly places, all danger and fear apart, that 
gives us spirit for the conflicts when they come. 

And this brings me to speak of the place there is 
in God for rest and the spiritual recruiting of our 
struggles. As the armed force, spent in the hard en- 



THE FORTIFIED STATE 315 

counter of the field, wants to be gathered into some 
fortified camp there to recruit by rest and sleep, so it 
is necessary for the Christian to find some strong hab- 
itation to which he may resort and cease for a time 
from the struggle. I^othing human bears a perpet- 
ual strain. Even the stoutest hero needs at times 
to be a quietist, resting in God, swallowed up and 
lost in the abysses of the divine glory and peace. It 
needs to be with him as with Moses when he was 
bearing the burden or charge of his people — to be 
called up often into the mount above the smoke and 
noisy turmoil of his cares, to be shut in with God in 
the glorious height of his friendship, there to be 
rested and refreshed and come down with a face ra- 
diating God's light, to review his work and reas- 
sume his burden. Or if we speak only of a conflict 
with our own bosom sins or temptations, if God did 
not sometimes raise us quite above them and rest 
us for a new engagement, it is doubtful whether 
we should not utterly faint and fall. To be with 
God, wholly shut up with God, sheltered and rested 
in the strong habitation of his love, this it is that 
freshens our powers and keeps us in heart for the 
mighty struggles of our warfare. 

I have already suggested that the castles and 
strong habitations of the ancient time contained the 
granaries and storehouses of supply, and so, in like 
manner, we get our food, not in the open field of our 
confiicts, but by going up out of them into that 
stronghold where God is wont to feed his people. 
We get our food in times of retirement and the soli- 
tary communion of prayer. We live and grow by 



316 THE FORTIFIED STATE 

the bread that cometh down from heaven. Here 
we find those bright revelations of truth, here we 
are let into that blessed acquaintanceship with God 
in which he becomes the unfailing supply of our 
hunger and the ever-living spring that forbids our 
thirst. But the supply is like that of the manna, 
it cannot be laid up. Even that knowledge that 
seems to be so clear and positive and full, and which 
we think can never depart, vanishes we know not 
how and is lost, unless the supply is recruited by a 
new and living access to God. Our state here is 
precisely that which the prophet describes : " He 
shall dwell on high, his place of defence shall be the 
munitions of rocks. Bread shall be given him, his 
waters shall be sure." 'No Christian could ever 
live or maintain his spiritual growth if he were al- 
ways out in the active fight of the field. He must 
come away sometimes from the clatter and din of 
the action, he must come up out of the dust and tur- 
moil, and seek in God that food which he ministers 
to silent thought and secret desire and private trust. 
Then and thus only can his vigor be maintained. 

Here, too, again we shall get our fresh armor and 
be prepared for a more energetic prosecution of our 
warfare. In the castle or strong habitation there 
was always a hall, hung about with every kind of 
armor for assault and defence. If a spear was 
broken yesterday or a shield pierced or a helmet 
gashed, here was a new supply. If the retainers lost 
any article in yesterday's fight, they are all refitted 
and equipped again here and sent forth in full pan- 
oply, drilled and harnessed for the fight. So it is 



THE FORTIFIED STATE 317 

that we are to get our armor renewed in the strong 
habitation to which we continually resort — entering 
the halls of faith to put on there the whole armor of 
God; and if you will see the armor waiting for us, 
it is catalogued in the sixth chapter of the Epistle to 
the Ephesians — girdle, breastplate, shoes, shield, 
helmet, sword — every sort of equipment necessary 
for us; so that if we go in there we are all refitted 
in the best manner. If yesterday we broke our res- 
olutions, or if we parted from the truth and fell into 
error, or if we broke the girdle of our self-control, 
or if we lost the helmet of hope and courage from 
our head, we can here obtain again whatever has been 
lost or damaged and by the holy drill of faith and 
prayer we can be instructed and prepared for a fresh 
and more successful engagement. '^ Blessed be the 
Lord, my strength, which teacheth my hands to 
war and my fingers to fight — my goodness and my 
fortress, my high tower and my deliverer, my shield 
and he in whom I trust." 

We need a strong habitation also to which we may 
resort in times when we seem, for the present, to be 
defeated or worsted. There is no one of mankind 
who undertakes to live a right life, to be a defender 
and maintainer of God's truth, to be a benefactor 
and saviour of his fellow-men, who will not some- 
times appear externally to be overcome by the adver- 
saries raised up against him. He will be maligned, 
slandered, misrepresented, cast out, persecuted. 
It was so with Moses and Paul and John the 
Baptist, and, above all, with Jesus Christ. Almost 
every great hero and champion of God has been at 



318 THE FORTIFIED STATE 

some time apparently crushed or defeated. I say, 
apparently. It is not so with him, for he has the tes- 
timony that he pleases God. God is the strong hab- 
itation of his soul and there he enters in, continually 
resorting thither to be strengthened, upheld and in 
the secret assurance of his faith to foresee the day of 
his victory. He is persecuted but not forsaken, cast 
down but not destroyed, for God approves him, and 
he dwells under the shadow of the Almighty. So 
also there will be times when the saint may seem to 
be worsted by his internal enemies. And then he 
will cry when his heart is overwhelmed: " Lead me 
to the rock that is higher than I, for thou hast been 
a shelter for me and a strong tower.'' Could we not 
fly in this manner to God we should make a very 
sorry figure in our welfare. But when we go to him, 
we are out of weakness made strong. And then if it 
be God that justifieth, who is he that condemneth? 

Once more, it is a great matter, as regards our 
courage and spirit in the warfare of our faith, that 
we have a sure defence at hand to which we can at 
any moment turn and be safe. We are not soldiers 
in the sense that we are in a continual campaign — if 
we imagine this when we say that our life is a war- 
fare it is a great mistake — our militant state is more 
truly conceived, after all, as a fortified state. Our 
excursions, forays, marches, campaigns all centre 
round a fortress. God is our strong habitation, and 
we go forth out of him clad in his armor to do his 
will and return at pleasure to his holy hill and the 
strong tower of his majesty. To him we continually 
resort. Ascending unto him we shut our enemies 



THE FORTIFIED STATE 319 

away. We occupy a height where we can pour 
down all destructive missiles upon them and they 
cannot reach us. Indeed, most of what we call our 
fighting consists in simply maintaining our fortress, 
where, if we are faithful and suffer no treason, we 
are safe and our victory is sure. Our fight is the 
good fight of faith, and faith is that fortified state in 
which we keep the strong habitation of God and 
abide in it as the secret place of the Most High. 

What is called the watch is no night and day 
exposure in the plain, but it is the watch of the 
fortress or strong habitation, a looking out from 
God, and down the solemn heights of his majesty on 
the world below. All enemies are below, and if 
sometimes we go down to meet them the everlasting 
gates are lifted up behind us, waiting to receive and 
shut us in when the contest is over. Instead, there- 
fore, of any such wearisome and repulsive engage- 
ment as many conceive when they hear the Christian 
life spoken of as a warfare, it is a life centred in 
security and rest, a castled height of strength and 
peace, a fortified house and strong habitation which 
it is our warfare to keep and from which, if we do 
not stray, we can never be driven. Let no one be 
repelled, then, by the representation that a Christian 
is a soldier and his life a warfare, for if there be he- 
roic victories to be won it is only the more attractive 
to a noble mind, since there is abundance of rest and 
peace and glorious respite in the strong habitation it 
maintains. 

Thus we discover why it is that all worldly living 



320 THE FORTIFIED STATE 

is wearisome and unsatisfactory, in that it is a 
state of continual war, mitigated by no reliefs or 
respites of shelter and security. After all, the 
worldly man is much more truly in a warfare than 
the Christian. The very principle of selfishness is 
war, and the selfish man goes into life as into a pred- 
atory excursion, to get or conquer to himself as he 
best can the condition of power and precedence that 
pleases his ambition. In this contest he stands in 
his own will, fighting on all his life long, out in the 
open field of the world's enmities, rivalries and arts; 
and how often is he wronged, how often defeated by 
wicked stratagems and frauds, how often, how con- 
tinually plotted against! There is no place for se- 
curity — nothing to do but keep the field, standing 
guard, as it were, for himself, and keeping up his 
part of the great war of selfishness that envelops 
the world. At last he grows sick of such a state, 
sick even of his victories. He wants rest. O, if 
there were only some strong habitation to which he 
could sometimes resort or make good his retreat 
and leave the turmoil of the great selfish world be- 
hind him, how gladly would he enter it. So, at least, 
he thinks, and with a deep sigh inwardly declares. 
And precisely here is the reason why so many be- 
come sick of the world and the whole game of life — 
it is because of the everlasting, unsheltered, unres- 
pited war they are obliged to support. It wears 
them out. Ambition fades. Victory loses its at- 
tractions, and they are willing not seldom even to 
die, if they can but escape the din of a contest so 
relentless. 



THE FORTIFIED STATE 321 

IN'otice how consistent with a general serenity 
is the Christian warfare, because it is a fortified 
state possessing all the conditions of security that 
are needful to the most perfect confidence. We have 
a strong city, salvation will God appoint for walls 
and bulwarks. Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace 
whose mind is stayed on thee. There can be no 
greater state of serenity for a human soul than that 
which is found in God as the strong habitation 
whereunto it may continually resort. Nor is there 
anything in the fact that our Christian life is a war- 
fare which at all disturbs the clearness and depth of 
this serenity. The soldier of Christ is raised above 
the reach of his enemy. 'No slander, no act of treach- 
ery nor even of murderous persecution can do more 
than fortify his course and settle his peace. The for- 
tified state he is in, or out of which he issues when he 
goes to the conflict, is a state too high and too strong, 
too essentially heroic to be thrown out of rest. And 
precisely here it is that Christian men are most dis- 
tinguished in the firmness, repose and peace of that 
unassailable height in which they live. 

The reason why so many disciples faint and lose 
their courage is evident. It is because they go down 
into the open field to fight out the war and do not be- 
take themselves to any such advantage as they might 
in the fortified state. They undertake to fight with- 
out fortifications. Instead of going to God or abid- 
ing in God as the strong habitation or tower of de- 
fence, they expect to carry the field by a perpetual 
stress of watch and active fight. And the result is 
what it should be when they undertake a task so 



322 THE FORTIFIED STATE 

heavy, righting out of their own force, their force 
is of necessity soon spent. Esteeming action every- 
thing and hanging everything on action, they are 
by and by quite disabled and ready to give over 
the contest. Accordingly there is nothing more 
common than a defeat which is caused by fighting. 
The Christian soldier is so determined to do, so fully 
set on carrying every point by a direct fight, that he 
makes no account of the fortified state. He faces his 
enemies in direct encounter. He attacks his bad 
thoughts to drive them out, and is astonished to find 
that they only pour in upon him in stronger legions. 
He attempts to kill his selfishness and becomes so 
anxious about it that he is really the more selfish in 
his continual attention to himself. And so by the 
very tensity of his warfare he exhausts, weakens and 
fatally defeats himself. My brethren, there is a 
more excellent way. The first thing to be learned in 
this great life-long warfare is how to be in it as a for- 
tified state. Without this you can do nothing. You 
must allow varieties and changes of action. You 
must have a height which you can ascend, a security 
and rest into which you may enter, a portcullis you 
can drop behind you to cut you off from the world 
and leave you for the time alone with God, and then 
when you sally forth in the holy armor of duty and 
sacrifice you will go with courage and confidence. 
Your fight will be a good fight of faith because the 
faith keeps you in a fortified state, which is your only 
hope of success and victory. Maintaining this, your 
course is certain ; failing of this your defeat is equally 
so. Therefore you must carry on the war, not in 



THE FORTIFIED STATE 323 

your own will or at your own charges, but you must 
have your soul fortified in God's love and friendship, 
and you must live so as to be always in confidence 
toward God. Your prayers must be in such free- 
dom and confidence that you will be ever ascending 
in them the holy height where he dwells, and enter- 
ing in to be with him above the world and its wars. 



SPIKITUAL THINGS THE OIsTLY SOLID* 

For the things which are seen are temporal ; but the 
things which are not seen are eternal. — 3 Cor. iv. 18. 

It is the great infirmity of man that he is so easily 
imposed upon by the senses. It cannot be denied 
that sensible things and objects do somehow exert a 
dreadful tyranny over his judgments and his charac- 
ter. The multitude of men go after their eyes. 
Things seen are to them the all and total of exist- 
ence. Things not seen are shadows only and names, 
without solidity. To look after these and to let go, 
in any degree, the pursuit of what they can see and 
handle appears to them to be a kind of insanity. 
What assignable and fixed reality is there in matters 
that no man ever saw or tasted or felt, — such as are 
out of the range of all perception, and are realized 
only as they are thought, imagined, reasoned or be- 
lieved? " 1^0," they say, " give us realities such as 
we verily know, and if the shadows of spirituality 
and religion, the unseen things or no-things that lie 
as clouds of mist below the horizon, must sometime 

* Extracts from a sermon preached in the North Church, Hart- 
ford, January, 1850. 

As a corrective of the view taken of the subject in these extracts, 
see a sermon from the same text written later, entitled "In and 
By Things Temporal are Given Things Eternal," to be found in 
the book " Sermons on Living Subjects," p. 268. 

324 



SPIRITUAL THINGS 325 

be attended to, let it be a matter by the way and not 
any part of the solid interest of life. Let us catch at 
the shadows just as we enter the shadow-land and 
when the more solid things of life can be thought of 
no longer." 

How different is the sublime truth taught by a 
Christian apostle! He reverses exactly the common 
opinion of mankind when living under the tyranny 
of the senses. To him the unrealities, the fogs and 
shadows of mere phantasm, are the things that meet 
the eye; the solid and valuable gifts are those which 
thought only beholds and faith and reason embrace. 
'' For the things which are seen are temporal; but 
the things which are not seen are eternal." 

The truth here affirmed or set forth, I now pro- 
pose to illustrate, viz.: That the least real and solid 
things are those which are visible, the most real and 
certain those which are invisible. 

Observe, first, then, that things visible have them- 
selves their highest meaning and reality when they 
are taken as being what they really are, images and 
outward signs of what is invisible. They are all a 
going on, a perpetual flowering and feeding, breath- 
ing and ceasing to breathe, having their times and 
limits fixed, even as the firmament of stars; for these 
wax old as a vesture of God, and when their time has 
come are to be folded up. But as they are only vest- 
ure and the invisible Spirit is manifested through 
the vesture, what is he but reality and what are they 
but signs? H the seen be temporal, what is the un- 
seen shining through but the eternal? And so we 
may look upon all the objects of our outward and 



326 SPIRITUAL THINGS 

visible state as so many passing shows or signs to the 
eye by which God and the things of an enduring life 
are manifested to us, apologies, forms, types of the 
eternal. The eternal is in them, but they them- 
selves are evanescent. 

It is also a very significant fact that all which is 
most permanent and solid in what we call nature is 
what is invisible in it, just that which no man ever 
saw with the eyes or knew through any one of his 
-G.Ye senses. How vastly more essential and stable 
is the law of gravity, known only to thought, than 
the matter of any orb of the sky, even the sun itself. 
So of the life power in all animal bodies, living on, 
the same though invisible, while the matter of the 
body is constantly changing. So of the chemical 
forces that hold all earthly bodies together by their 
invisible attraction. So of the law of expansive 
force in steam; the steam is lost in a puff, but the law 
remains. So of magnetism, electricity, light. The 
manifestations of these we see in the aurora or hear 
in the crash of thunder ; but the invisible power and 
law that rules their manifestations, unseen, is more 
stable and majestic than they. In short, we discov- 
er, whenever we glance at the world of things around 
us, that what is visible is least real, and that behind 
the visible, discoverable only to faith and reason, are 
hidden the vast changeless laws and forces which 
give to the works of God, as set forth by science, 
whatever appearance of eternity and stability they 
exhibit. 

And by this fact God is teaching us here ever, in 
the arrangement of our earthly state, to look for the 



THE ONLY SOLID 327 

solid never in the outward and visible, always in that 
which is revealed to thought and reason thereby, and 
has in that view a quality that is akin to thought and 
to mind. The outside, the shows and goings on of 
things, are shadows only, the substance those eternal 
laws and forces that are hid within, there to actuate 
and rule their changes. Matter is only fog, laws are 
the real substance. 

The same is true of human history. Great earth- 
quakes, pestilences and wars have had a certain pow- 
er in the world, but how little in comparison with 
opinions, truths, moral and religious causes. I^ot 
all the victories of the arms of Greece have had more 
than a fraction of the power exerted on human so- 
ciety by the invisible thoughts of Homer, Aristotle 
and Plato. And it is doubtful whether the moral 
justice and purity of the life of Socrates has not 
more powerfully, steadily and permanently moved 
the world than all of these together, though by a 
method more secret and remote from palpable dis- 
covery. If then you ask what power has been least 
temporary and most like the power of eternity in 
human society, we have no place for hesitation. It 
is Christianity, the secret leaven that was hid in 
Christ's life and by him deposited in the world. 
There have been great empires in the world since 
Christ came into it, great revolutions, great exploits 
of war, but the invisible King has been stronger than 
all visible. His kingdom has stood firm, revealing 
a kind of eternity in the history of time. It has out- 
lived all the splendors of human empire by its si- 
lence reverberating through the ages, felt but not 



328 SPIRITUAL THINGS 

heard, while the tumults of armies and the pomps of 
outward grandeur have one after another ceased and 
been forgotten. Christianity is to human society 
what the great powers of nature are to its outward 
shows and objects, its invisible force and law. It is 
the kingdom of God in the world, immovable and 
solid just in proportion as it is invisible. 

Every man can see within himself, if he will, that 
his own being touches the permanent and solid only 
in its relations to what is spiritual. It is not his ap- 
petites or passions or eyes that fasten upon what is 
permanent, but it is his intellectual convictions, his 
thoughts and wants and spiritual aspirations. The 
truths of geometry, for example, are truths eternal 
as God, more eternal than the stars, because before 
the stars. These he thinks out into vast systems of 
absolute eternal verity, and shows therein that, when 
he turns to what is invisible to the eyes, he can real- 
ize and prove what is less temporal and even older 
than the firmament itself. 

So when he thinks of truth and right, these ideas, 
themselves coeternal with God, are the foundation 
of God's law over all moral creatures and the rule of 
his teachings to them. What right and truth are to 
him they are to all worlds and beings forever. There 
may be different judgments and different moral rules 
adopted concerning particular actions of life, but the 
moment we rise to what is invisible, to the principles 
that govern all actions and constitute the trueness of 
all truths, then we strike eternity and lay hold of the 
changeless. 

So also with the wants and aspirations of our relig- 



THE ONLY SOLID 329 

ioTis nature. God is their object. ISTothing below 
God contents tbem or at all meets them. If we sin 
against God, our remorse has a sound of eternal thun- 
der in it. If we reject and turn awaj from God, our 
wants cry out within, as if the hunger of eternity 
were in them. If we come back as prodigals from our 
husks of temporality and embrace our God in true 
faith and penitence of heart, then we experience God. 
"We are conscious of God within us, we know his 
peace, we feel that we have the sense of eternity in 
him. He is invisible, but more real to us now and 
more solid than all the most solid things of time. O, 
what depth of meaning is there now in the apostle's 
words: ^' For the things that are seen are temporal; 
but the things that are not seen are eternal.'' The 
soul feels that she has come away from a life in the 
temporal, — dreams, shadows, nothings, — and has 
found her God and rested in her eternity. 

It is evident that whoever will arrive at the most 
adequate judgments and truest views of things must 
disengage himself from the trammels of sense and 
lean continually toward what is spiritual and above 
sense. All the progress that has been made in the 
investigation of nature has been made in this way. 
There was no science till men were able to cease fol- 
lowing their eyes. Then they came to the discovery 
of great laws of order and immaterial, invisible 
forces. The truest and most solid knowledge of 
things has been always found in looking through and 
beyond their visible objects and changes. O, if we 
could get away from our superficial and carnal thral- 
dom to objects of sense, if we could see the face of 



330 SPIRITUAL THINGS 

God shining out upon us everywhere from his works 
and the great invisible kingdom of eternity by which 
he rules in all things visible, preparing to give us 
himself and conduct us inward to a stable, unchange- 
able rest, how differently should we live ! Could we 
look on all these objects around us as the shows and 
signs of what is better and higher, the temporal as 
the alphabet or first lesson of the eternal, if in things 
we could see the face of principles, in events Provi- 
dence, in all objects and changes God, what dignity 
would possess our judgments and how quickly would 
the grossness of our carnal conceptions of things be 
melted away. 'Now we look on material objects and 
pursuits much as the earlier and ruder ages looked 
on natural events. But when the coarseness of the 
mere eye gave way to the mild inspection of thought, 
then science appeared. Just so it will be when men 
are able to get loose from the trammels of sin and 
look upon this life in such a way as to apprehend its 
spiritual meanings and realities. The world will 
rise to a new scale of dignity and will be even more 
remarkably changed than it has been by science. 
Then it will see the eternal in the temporal, the spir- 
itual in the visible, and God and truth in all. Then 
the low bondage and the sordid passions, and all the 
abject conceptions of life will be expelled. God 
grant the speedy coming of such a day. 



THE PEEPAEATIONS OF ETEEISTITY* 

For God is my king of old, working salvation in the 
midst of the earth.— Psalm Ixxiv. 13. 

We may properly assume it as the true signifi- 
cance of the Psalmist's language in this text that 
God is managing time for eternity's sake. It is to 
him, in fact, the glory of the world that God has a 
purpose in it so ancient, persistent and irreversible, 
the purpose to prepare issues of salvation for a life 
to come. And it is in the highest endearment of such 
a feeling, nay, with a feeling consciously sublimed 
by the contemplation of such a being, that he claims 
a title to him, calls him his own, Ms king. He mag- 
nifies the world and life, and God as the God of the 
world, and declares that there is a meaning in it, an 
end preparing by it, such as imparts an aspect of 
grandeur to its affairs, and solves the otherwise un- 
comfortable mystery of our earthly experience. The 
affairs of time, then, are the preparations of eter- 
nity. 

By the affairs of time I mean everything we know 
and suffer and do in our earthly state, — the consti- 
tution of nature, its objects and arrangements, the 
events of history, the experiences of life and its 

* Extracts from a sermon preached in the North Church, Hart- 
ford, July, 1857. 

331 



332 THE PREPARATIONS 

struggles and all the works of grace in Jesus Christ, 
or the plan of revealed religion consummated in his 
person. All these taken comprehensively I call the 
affairs of life, understanding that they constitute a 
frame of order and divine counsel, being all concen- 
tred in one and the same end, the preparation 
of a world beyond the world. One solution compre- 
hends them all and settles their meaning. That this 
is the declared truth of Scripture hardly needs to be 
shown. It may not always be declared in a formal 
and philosophic way. But everything stands on this 
basis. The world is created for man as man is for 
a great eternity, in the image and glory of his Maker. 
And when he falls under sin, everything bends to 
his fortunes and becomes an operative grace for his 
recovery. All history is the training of God, who 
by love and judgment is working salvation. And 
when the work is done upon us, death opens the gate 
and we pass out into the silent world of eternity, such 
as our fixed character requires us to be. The world 
and its affairs are not otherwise intelligible. Life is 
a riddle forever inexplicable, if it be not solved in 
this way. 

There is, in short, no dignity of reason, no intel- 
lectual unity, no sense or order, no great purpose in 
life, nothing that comforts our understanding, till we 
begin to look on it as a preparation, a first chapter of 
some good and blessed eternity. Till then it is 
only a jargon, a school that is drilling for the 
grave, a fight whose victory collapses into nothing- 
ness. It has no meaning till we can say that God is 
in it with a great design ulterior. And that does 



OF ETERNITY 333 

make it intelligible. Taking that for truth we can 
bring everything into a possible frame of order and 
consistency. I say not that we can even then com- 
prehend everything with a positive understanding. 
There will be many things still wearing a dark as- 
pect and greatly perplexing our speculative under- 
standing. But we can at least raise guesses, sur- 
mises and possible solutions even for the darkest 
questions; and so despite all seeming difficulties we 
can believe that God, who has a depth of wisdom 
unfathomable by us, is nevertheless working salva- 
tion, bending all things into combination with his 
mighty purposes. There we can rest and our rest 
will be intelligent. Nay, it will even be the more 
intelligent in that it supposes a unity of meaning 
and a concert of agencies and powers vaster than the 
present reach of our faculties. 

Let us then turn our thoughts for a moment on 
the sublime aspect given to this world and its 
affairs when it is regarded as the preparation of 
eternity. In no other aspect or connection than 
just this do we apprehend the true sublimity of this 
world and our experience in it. JSTature has a great 
many grand objects and impressive scenes. The 
waves of human history beat heavy on the shores of 
time. The fears we conquer, the loads we bear, the 
dangers we confront, the hard fight we sometimes 
maintain, give a certain brave look to many human 
incidents. And yet we really see nothing grand in 
our existence till we see the roll and hear the roar 
of eternity in it. What we want is to see our king 
of old, combining all things in one purpose, all 



334 THE PREPARATIONS 

events and changes, all ages and eras, all victories 
and storms, all creations of genius and desolations of 
power, the works of nature, the machineries of Prov- 
idence, the mighty births and birth-times of grace, 
pouring in together to concentrate in salvation, roll- 
ing down their flood to lapse in the glories and the 
glorious silence of eternity. Here it is and nowhere 
else that we get some just impression of the world 
and its affairs. 

I stood not many days ago, a spectator freshly 
impressed with the scene, on the bridge that spans 
the rapids of Magara. There below, the eye just 
distinguishes the brink-line of the precipice off which 
the waters pour, as if pouring into hell or some un- 
known abyss whose bottom only the imagination 
fixes, — after that last plunge unseen, unheard. 
Above, far up, the coming waters roll and break, 
dashing madly down the rocky bed, tossing their 
wild arms to each other, shouting, roaring, ravening, 
with voices never spent and rushing on as doom 
hither, and still on, to the final plunge. Why is it, 
as every thoughtful person will testify, that he gets 
his deepest and most overwhelming impressions of 
sublimity just here, not from the fall itself or even 
from its stunning thimders. It is because the prep- 
aration is here, because the known is rushing to the 
unknown, and the imagination, hovering over the 
abyss with measures of weight and motion already 
supplied, sends the torrent river farther down than 
fact ever could, even though it fell into gulfs miles 
deep. Just so it is that we fitly conceive the world 
and its affairs only when we take them as prepara- 



OF ETERNITY 335 

tions of eternity, a mighty flood of woes and wars 
and toils and fears rolling down the verge and laps- 
ing in the silence of eternity. The preparation is 
great and fearful, because eternity is in it. Would 
that I could place you here, where my text proposes 
to look on all things in our mortal state as pouring 
into this grand central purpose of God, the working 
of salvation, the preparation of eternity. 

First you would see the world itself, made for it 
from the stars downward, day unto day uttering 
speech, night unto night showing knowledge of God; 
all rivers, continents and seas, all growths, climates, 
winds and storms, all elements and elemental laws, 
things which harm us and things that feed us, what- 
ever we seek, whatever we fear, that which con- 
quers us and that which we must needs conquer, — 
all arranged so as to express God and be the revela- 
tion of his majesty, and so as to be a fit field of exer- 
cise, trial, discipline, and finally an organ of salva- 
tion for us. 

The family and the beginning of our life in child- 
hood, where even sin is flexible, society braving in 
wrongs and struggling after rights, civil government 
with its laws and tribunals, the mighty contests of 
empire, commerce, industry, invention, written lan- 
guage and its treasures, the powers revealed by 
science, all the great appointments of life prepared 
for in the constitution of nature, fall into the same 
order and fulfil this same overmastering idea, the 
training and restoring of souls, the preparation of 
eternity. The providential empire corresponds. 
Here first we meet the enemy our sins provoke, and 



336 THE PREPARATIONS 

begin to smart Tinder the retributive courses loos- 
ened by our sin. Our ambition here encounters its 
limits, and sinks exhausted before walls it cannot 
batter or surmount. Our affections bleed and burn, 
strong with their own bitterness and poisoned by 
their own hot fevers; our objects fly us, our trusts 
disappoint us. Enemies rise up to do us wrong, and 
hurl back sin upon us, that we may see what it is. 
Struggle, fight, defeat, weariness, danger, loss, in- 
terspace our successes or fence them quite away. 
Nothing runs smooth, but everything whirls like a 
rapid rushing to the fall. We get a little strength 
by our pertinacity and then we break asunder into 
some invalid state that shows us what we are. We 
get a little knowledge, and after a long time get 
enough to see that we know nothing, till finally, dis- 
covering how short our reason must be, we begin to 
think of faith. Our faith is tried on this side and 
on that, till the conceit is quite winnowed out of us, 
and then we truly believe. 

Meantime the public history of the world, includ- 
ing us and all men, is rolling on as God rolls it. He 
is the King of old, working salvation in it from the 
beginning onward. The eras come and go, the emi- 
grations are led forth, the empires rise and fall, wars 
trample down the continents and stain the seas. Con- 
stitutions are born and lapse into anarchy. Liber- 
ties shake ofl their chains and chains return to 
shackle liberties. Learning and science emerge, 
disappear, return, kindling new hopes and prepar- 
ing the discovery that God alone is light. Persecu- 
tions rage as fires, to purify the good and display the 



OF ETERNITY 337 

cruelty of evil. All history surges heavily from 
side to side, but God is in the flood, working salva- 
tion and building up the kingdom of his Son. His- 
tory, therefore, is the preparation of eternity. All 
its events transpire, all its woes and blessings flow, 
as he permits, working together for good to them 
that love God and are called according to his pur- 
pose. Apart from this and considered as a finality, 
history is a current that runs nowhere, having 
neither dignity nor law. But in this it unites ret- 
ribution, correction, impulse, sets on changes that 
are wanted, washes out evils that are not wanted, 
and becomes a minister of salvation. 

But there is more in the world than this, more 
than nature, more than Providence. We cannot un- 
derstand the world till we distinguish the interweav- 
ing of grace. It began at the first moment of the 
fall, and the bruising of a serpent-head only figures 
the plan God had been prosecuting for the expurga- 
tion of evil. He had all the while been preparing 
and pressing on a Christian history, organizing first a 
germinal order in a single people, small and weak but 
fitly chosen, leading them on through marches, cap- 
tivities and trials, and steering them finally through 
all the assaults of the great nations around them 
and out of their own idolatrous habit, to be their 
God indeed. The way was long, the floods of war 
and commotion were heavy, but they sang: ^^ The 
Lord sitteth King forever.'^ Trained up thus in a 
history and a ritual all divine, the fulness of time 
was reached, and now at last appeared the Shiloh 
foretokened, the Incarnate Son of God. In him 



338 THE PREPARATIONS 

at last was brought out and born, born of a woman, 
the embodied token of all the past history, the 
sign of him who was King of old, working salva- 
tion, and his name is called Jesus. Here is the great 
event of history, that which struggled latently in 
the bosom of the past, and when he appears, we are 
forever forbidden to look on the world as a finality 
in anything. Visibly now it is the preparation of 
eternity. O, that passion of the Son of God! How 
potently does it run through the world and its af- 
fairs, which answer, as it were, in tremulous feeling 
to the touch. As the earth shuddered in it and the 
sun turned black in horror over it, so does every- 
thing mortal since that day take the sense of it and 
bend to its dominion. 'Now is the King made visi- 
ble and the kingdom stands revealed. He that was 
King of old, working salvation and preparing the 
grace of eternity, shows us in his birth, his person, 
his death, his resurrection from the dead, how close 
eternity is lying to the confines of time and what our 
God is doing for us in his works and world. Chris- 
tianity and the revealed religion of the gospel, the 
slow-growing bible finished and consummated in 
Christ, in this and this alone do we get the real sig- 
nificance of life. Here at last we get the true im- 
pression of our otherwise disjointed, unmeaning 
world. We listen to its surging roar and the tur- 
moil of its sorrows, toils and commotions, and we 
hear the sound of the unknown eternity in it, that 
eternity which otherwise were silent. It prepares 
a lapse into eternity. Everything that God has done 
with us and upon us is the drifting, pouring river of 



OF ETERNITY 339 

salvation, — Sabbaths, churches, preachings, prayers, 
praises, sacraments, the writings of holy men, the 
triumphs of martyrs, godly lives and examples; and 
attendant upon all, working through all, the power- 
ful undercurrent ministry of an almighty Spirit, con- 
vincing of sin, calling with a silent voice and sealing 
with a silent impress for eternity, — such are the 
forces of grace combined with what we call our life, 
turning all our experiences and even our tempta- 
tions themselves into arguments of faith and instru- 
ments of salvation. 

It is clear in this light that men must see and con- 
fess that in this discipline everything was done for 
their salvation that could be done, nothing was omit- 
ted. The very frame of the creation from the heav- 
ens downward, they will see, was redolent of grace 
and salvation, every nook and corner and crevice of 
life was packed full of salvation, the subtlest and 
most elemental forces were streams of salvation. 
The world of nature was a temple for it, their body 
was its instrument, their youth its vantage-time, and 
all the relationships of family and society conditions 
of its training. The dying Son of God, they will 
see, was the interpreter of all that was going on 
about them. The Church itself only embodied in 
example what was filling up the world in discipline. 
The ministries of angels only brought into the world 
what all the world was ministering. And the eter- 
nal Spirit of God, piercing all bosoms and coursing 
through all depths of thought, only ministered with- 
in what all was testifying without. The rivers do 
not run to the sea or the rapids rush to their fall 



340 THE PREPARATIONS OF ETERNITY 

more undivertedly or with a cleaner sweep, than all 
these currents of life, as God appoints them, run to 
a good eternity. Redemption, grace, salvation, eter- 
nal life, these are all a kind of cross, labor and pas- 
sion, straggling after yon and with yon every hour. 
Isaiah, when he looked on that vision wherein he 
saw the glory of Christ and spake of him, represents 
the seraphim as hovering over his throne, crying one 
to another: "Holy is the Lord of Hosts, the whole 
earth is full of his glory.'' Yes, the earth was full, 
full of Christian meaning, full of salvation. He 
looked upon the heavens as a tent stretched out for 
evil minds to dwell under and feel the regenerative 
love of God. The steadfast sun, the everlasting 
mountains, day and night, all that beams with love, 
all that bursts with terror, society and Providence 
and providential history, the gospel crying, " Be 
ye reconciled to God," the omnipotent Spirit, striv- 
ing and heaving and drawing to accomplish a recon- 
ciliation, — all these to him were Christ and salva- 
tion. The world was full of his glory. 

O that, as a sinner, you too could once compre- 
hend the errand for which God sent you hither, and 
see the goodness and forgiving grace he crowds upon 
you! What a thrill of wonder and blessing would 
seize you, and how eagerly you would sing, as a pen- 
itent forgiven by the King: "Mine eyes have seen 
thy salvation/' 



GOD'S ONE FAMILY* 

Of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is 
named. — Eph. iii. 15. 

It is impossible not to raise the inquiry often, at 
least within ourselves, what is hereafter to be our 
relation to the peoples of other worlds and eras, an 
inquiry that sometimes baffles us, because we do not 
know who they are and what. The Scriptures show 
us at the very dawn of the creation that other 
created beings then existed, but do not give us their 
date or show us where they dwell. And the modern 
astronomic discoveries force it on us, as a conviction 
not to be resisted, that worlds innumerable exist in 
habitable order, and, doubtless, that they have their 
inhabitants. All these intelligences, the most an- 
cient and the most recent, have their spiritual rela- 
tions to God, and the curiosity we have concerning 
them is in another view a dim instinct of affi.nity 
with them. And it compels us to the anticipation 
that we shall some time know more of them than we 
do at present. The Scriptures, too, encourage this 
anticipation. Still there is a feeling in many that 
we are beings so inferior, so low in order, as to make 
it presumptuous to imagine that we can ever move 

* Extracts from a sermon preached in the North Church, Hart- 
ford, August, 1857, 

341 



342 GOD'S ONE FAMILY 

with tlieni in a common society. The thought is 
oppressive and sometimes even painful. Anything 
is painful that makes us insignificant. To be shut 
away by insignificance from any of God's intelli- 
gences chills us, and we fall back, alas! too easily, 
to that low range of life which looks for nothing 
greater than our present objects. 

I propose it then, as my subject, to show that the 
whole spiritual empire of God is homogeneous, that 
whatever distinctions of era and world and power 
may exist, they are all such as will merge in a com- 
mon unity and hrotJierhood. 

This at least is intimated in the words of the 
apostle. I think it is more than intimated, it is pos- 
itively afiirmed; for if we follow back his thread for 
a few verses, we find that he is not speaking here of 
the glorified of our world in heaven, named after 
Christ in common with us, who are baptized into his 
name on earth. On the contrary, he is speaking of 
principalities and powers in the heavenly places, 
those nameless mighty ones that fill the unknown 
tiers of worlds. These are distinctly in mind as the 
subject of discourse, and bearing them in mind he 
says: "Of whom the whole family in heaven and 
earth is named," — language that includes and is by 
him understood to include all the highest orders of 
being in the spiritual universe. 

Astronomic science has in modern times opened 
new and more stupendous conceptions of the spirit- 
ual universe. The earth is no more a central figure, 
and the stars its lamps in the sky. Worlds on worlds 
are reported, their count is innumerable and they 



GOD'S ONE FAMILY 343 

appear to be habitable. What then are we — what 
figure can we make among these world-peoples above 
ns ? Our very faith is throttled by such numbers and 
magnitudes, and we surrender, it may be, to a kind 
of conscious nothingness. But what if we discover, 
as here, that there is a grand law of unity that com- 
prehends as perfectly the minds, as the law of grav- 
ity comprehends the matter, of so many worlds, — a 
law that gives us the property, so to speak, of all 
the minds, all the histories, all the dignities of the 
spiritual universe. We then are expanded as much 
as the world is, are we not? Why then are we op- 
pressed by these astronomic magnitudes ? When we 
find a love in our own hearts that is capable of in- 
cluding in one family of blessing and conscious fra- 
ternity all minds, a universal interpreter, a univer- 
sal bond of fellowship, why not believe in a spiritual 
universe as easily as we do in a material, and hasten 
to take possession of both in the name of the Lord of 
Hosts. 

Doing this again, what revelations are we thus to 
meet in our future life! As we blend with all the 
great historic minds of the worlds, what facts are to 
be reported to us, what experiences opened, what 
histories recited, what wonders of God discovered! 
And what an opening is there to you here, my breth- 
ren, what a bursting away of boundaries, what a 
lifting of aims, what a license given to hope ! That 
word, IretJiren, just spoken, what does it mean, how 
high does it reach, what is it but a word of spiritual 
peerage in God's realm? Know ye not that ye shall 
judge angels? Know ye not that ye are made kings 



344 GOD'S ONE FAMILY 

and priests "iinto God? We know not yet what we 
shall be, but we do know whither we are going. We 
are going into good and great society, O, that our 
lives and thoughts and works and character could be 
such as our mighty hope requires ! If we are going 
so soon to mingle in such high company, company 
so pure, so mighty, much of it so ancient, how shall 
we consent to sleep in dulness, how to rest in selfish- 
ness? To believe little, to grope and grovel in a 
life that is buried under things, to be greedy and 
sharp, to do mean things, to dwell in impure 
thoughts, and then out of such drivelling enter the 
great paradise and mingle with the great pure minds 1 
O, it is impossible ! They are not going to be cheat- 
ed by us. They are too old, have too high a sense, 
know the standards too well, and have put too many 
devils under chains to be imposed upon by us. We 
must be ready for the company as it is, ennobled in 
the same purity, established in the same truth, culti- 
vated into the same love, all genuine, honest, real. 
We shall be in liberty when we seek such things. 
We shall want a character finished that can fitly 
receive these high congratulations. We shall de- 
spise everything in us that cannot be respected in 
the grand society of the worlds. Prayers that do 
not purify us will not satisfy. Truths that do not 
assimilate to God will be lies. And a love that does 
not do things lovely will be deemed, if possible, a 
greater lie. Contrary to all such figments we shall 
seek realities, and so be ready as peers for the grand 
society in which we are to have our place. So let 
us live and watch for the day. 



existeinTCe co:n"summated in a state 
of praise * 

And after these things I heard a great voice of much 
people in heaven saying, Alleluia, salvation and glory and 
honor and power unto the Lord our God. — Rev. xix. 1. 



Wliat I propose is to indicate the true meaning 
and majesty of praise, and to show that praise, prop- 
erly conceived, is just that exercise in which our hu- 
man sentiments are raised highest and our strength 
in good and blessedness is most complete. 

I do not, of course, ascribe any so great dignity 
and value to mere singing or to combinations of 
voices in choral ascriptions. And yet I might do 
even this with just as good reason as I might speak 
of heaven, meaning the sky and the astronomic alti- 
tudes and worlds, as being the residence of the glori- 
fied. We are obliged to speak in figure of everything 
pertaining to the better world, and as heaven is the 
figure of altitude and place, so psalm, anthem, harps, 
choirs and the sound of many waters are the fig- 
ures of celestial praise. And they become figures 
of praise in the fact that they are modes and views 
with us of expressing praise. The praise, at bottom, 

* Extracts from a sermon preached in the North Church, Hart- 
ford, January, 1859. 

345 



346 EXISTENCE CONSUMMATED 

is a mere state of mind, a swelling of the heart, — ^in 
that its reality lies; but song and music are natural 
means, at least here on earth, of expressing the 
praises of the heart. 

Whatever we praise we do by the supposition en- 
joy, and our praise of God is in fact the mode and 
means and vehicle of our enjoyment of him. If we 
praise a landscape it is our best method of enjoying 
a landscape; for we do not merely look passively 
on at such times, but we rally our perceptive and 
enjoying powers, and go into the praise of it with a 
zest more positive than we could have in a state ut- 
terly silent. So if we praise a man, be it a man of 
genius, a hero, a deliverer of his country, a saint, a 
friend, the more heartily or unqualifiedly we lay 
ourselves out in the praise, the sharper and more 
vivid is our enjoyment of him. We never praise any- 
thing, as the beauty of a child, the graceful motion 
of a bird in the air, the exquisite finish of some tiniest 
flower, without calling ourselves into an act of enjoy- 
ment, — taking it up to praise it, the praise becomes 
our enjoyment. And precisely on this principle it 
is that the praise of God becomes, and is forever to 
be, one of the best means of our enjoyment of God. 
In that praise all our most perceptive and receptive 
capacities are to be opening forever in discoveries, 
apprehensions, senses of his beauty, truth, majesty, 
wisdom, greatness and glory. In this praise we do 
not simply lie down under eternal passivity to let 
the sense of his perfections roll over us in waves of 
blessing, but we take the point of highest action or 
most intense activity and receptivity, where our eyes 



IN A STATE OF PRAISE 347 

are ready to see, our hearts to feel, our tongues to 
sing, our members to serve, and our whole living 
personality to glow, in the burning adoration of sacri- 
fice. Joining all our powers to praise the Lord, all 
our powers are filled with the conscious fulness of 
joy from him. And the joy we have includes, 
though we call it praise, every faculty in us that 
can be made to vibrate with feeling or glow with 
energy. 

We shall also find that praise, partly for the rea- 
son that it is a pleasure so unselfish or unalloyed, is 
the most unwearying of all pleasures. We tire out 
in study, criticism, advocacy, partisanship, and even 
in the enjoyment of science, to say nothing of the 
lower pleasures of the eye and the appetite by which, 
as everyone knows, we are soon sated. Any kind 
of exercise or enjoyment which is easily invaded by 
ambition and the subtle suggestions of selfishness 
wearies the soul at times and lets it drop into moods 
of distaste and self-accusation. And so true is this 
that even supplication itself is often exhaustive; for 
when the mind is pressing its suit for this and that 
object of desire however holy or benevolent, the de- 
siring attitude lets in unwittingly motives and 
thoughts that centre in self. But in praise the whole 
stress of feeling is outward and upward, and the soul 
only asks to give out or express something, to extol, 
adore, cover with glory the object of its praise. The 
exercise is too simple and single and too completely 
withholden from returning upon self to allow weari- 
ness. The mind, too, is freshened always by that 
which feeds it; for it is another remarkable fact in 



348 EXISTENCE CONSUMMATED 

respect to the praise of God that it is always below 
the measures and qualities of the object, expanding 
therefore always, and getting strength and swelling 
in volume by the very training of praise itself. 

It is a great fact as regards the volume of joy that 
may be yielded by the exercise of praise, that it is 
the only exercise in which we really appropriate and 
take into enjoyment the infinite. We ourselves are 
finite and yet we have aspirations and affinities that 
link us as clearly to the infinite. Indeed it is a kind 
of necessity for us that our finite and limited nat- 
ure be complemented and in a sense made infinite 
by our union to the central good and greatness of 
God's illimitable majesty. Hence it will be ob- 
served, finite though we be, that nothing finite meets 
our want. We must go over somehow and lay hold 
of the infinite and claim our property in it, else we 
are hungry, as in low feeding, and cannot rest. This 
we may even call the economy of our finite exist- 
ence; it never gets its measures till it is complement- 
ed in the infinite. And exactly this is the office, 
meaning and place of praise. Praise is the overflow 
of our joy in God, and we have this joy to overflow- 
ing because the sense of the infinite has finally rolled 
in upon our love, — infinite greatness, goodness, 
beauty, truth, perfection. We have not compre- 
hended God, of course, in all his depth of holiness 
and counsel, but we have grasped these perfections, 
called them ours, taken them into our feeling, and 
have them to enjoy in a sublimity of blessing the 
more transcendent, just because they are unfathom- 
able and measureless. O, what a thought it is that 



IN A STATE OF PRAISE 349 

we, as praising creatures, beginning here to thrill in 
ecstasies of love and worship, have only just come 
doT\Ti to the shores of God's eternity to take posses- 
sion of it and embark upon it, hence and forever 
to sail away in glorious discovery along the firm 
continents of his purposes and among the green isles 
of his love and blessing! What we now call praise 
is nothing more, in fact, than our voyage into the in- 
finite good and glory begun. And that is a kind of 
voyage that will never grow dull, because it will be 
taking us farther into God and his deep mystery for- 
ever. 

The great misery of sin is that it shatters the in- 
ternal unity of souls, parts the reason from the con- 
science and the passions and lusts from both, arms 
the imagination to raise up fiery desolating wars 
against control in every part, turns order into confu- 
sion and sets all highest instincts and aspirations 
chafing in mad irritation against each other. ISTow it 
is the peculiarity of praise that it electrifies and 
brings into orderly play all the functions and powers 
together, and fills them with a common bliss. When 
I praise a friend, it is implied in the transaction that 
I not merely think about him, or reason or remem- 
ber or have sentimental affections or indulge in im- 
aginations that magnify him, but if the praise is to 
be unqualified and total I gather in all my powers to 
offer their common tribute. All that I can think 
of him and say for him and feel toward him is not 
enough to vent the admiring homage of my love. 
And if this be true in the lower and merely human 
ranges of praise, how much more in the praise of 



350 EXISTENCE CONSUMMATED 

God! How, then, will it be in the full and unre- 
stricted praise of that world where the vision of God 
is perfect, veiled by no guiltiness, marred by no ob- 
liquity? What a noble consciousness of order and 
health will then come into the soul from such undis- 
tracted and full praise of God! The wars of the 
mind are all over now, the aifinities are all in chime, 
and the whole nature settles into God's own order 
in the tonic harmonies of praise. 

The grand problem of God in the existence of 
created intelligences is to construct a living temple 
of them, or, what is the same, to build them into a 
state of perfect and eternally blessed society. And 
it is in praise, the common praise of God, that they 
will most naturally and understandingly coalesce. 
Multitudes are wont to coalesce and kindle together 
in the heat of a common praise. Assembled to cele- 
brate some great deliverance or deliverer, in other 
words to hold a grand festive and laudatory com- 
memoration, no matter who they are or were, how 
hostile in their public and personal affinities, how un- 
equal their grade of society, how repugnant their 
manners and tastes, how opposite their opinions, 
they so far take a common impulse, flow together, 
imderstand each other, enjoy each other and kindle 
in the joy of a common exultation. So in a much 
higher and more complete sense it will be, when the 
righteous minds of the universe meet and join their 
praise together before the Lord of all. They are 
interpreted one to another by their common bliss of 
praise. Men vvho, by reason of dissimilar tastes 
and temperaments and modes of training, held each 



m A STATE OF PRAISE 361 

other aloof in a qualified distrust or dislike, become 
intelligible now when they meet in the common joy 
of praise. Strangers of the strange kingdoms and 
worlds, all the unknown intelligences thronging in 
from the far-off, outlying regions, flow into chime 
at once and the confidence of a perfect society, by 
only meeting each other and enjoying each other's 
joy in the common praises of God. Enough that 
they are all God's praising creatures; that discov- 
ered, they are one forever, even as God is one among 
them, inhabiting the praises of all their Israels from 
all their strange worlds. And so the heart, the 
grand metropolitan centre of the social unity and 
life, is to be discovered in the unity of their praise. 
The chiming of their universal hymn holds them in 
living accord forever. All orders, powers, tiers, 
realms flow in together, as so many strains of vocal- 
ized joy, to respond and blend and waken conscious 
harmonies and so to become a perfect society in the 
play of their joyous affinities. The temple into 
which they are built is fitted and framed together 
by such affinities, even as the prophet said: " Thou 
shaft call thy walls salvation and thy gates praise." 

It amounts simply to this, that our created minds 
are made to be orchestras within, vibrating in great 
feeling, silent feeling if you will, to God, as harps 
are made for sound and harp-strings to vibrate as 
the means of sound. Hence also the wondrous 
musical analogies of the material world, a musical 
octave set in the atmospheric conditions, even as a 
prismal octave is set in the colors of light; all woods 
and metals, strings, glass, India rubber, strokes of 



352 EXISTENCE CONSUMMATED 

flintj and even the solid, heaven-piercing mountains, 
are tempered by the Creator to be instruments of 
music and chime in harmonies of sound. What have 
we in all these elements that compose the total sub- 
stance of the world itself, but a fit analogon of the 
fact that all the spiritual and intelligent creatures 
of God are made to be one august ever-swelling hymn 
of praise to the common Lord and Creator? Thus 
the apostle John represents in his vision, discov- 
ering first ^^ the four beasts and the four and twenty 
elders, having every one of them harps," and break- 
ing out in a new song, ^^ Thou art worthy, for thou 
hast redeemed us unto God by thy blood out of 
every kindred and tongue and people;" and then, 
again, hearing the responsive voice of many angels 
round about the throne, and the number of them was 
ten thousand times ten thousand and thousands of 
thousands saying : " "Worthy is the Lamb to receive 
power and riches and wisdom and strength and honor 
and glory and blessing." And again, as if the sub- 
stance of the creation was not yet full of the praise, 
he adds : " And every creature which is in heaven 
and on earth and under the earth, and such as are in 
the sea, heard I saying, ' Blessing and honor and 
glory and power be unto him that sitteth upon the 
throne and unto the Lamb forever and ever.' " The 
stops of creation are all out, he means to say, and the 
grand organ-frame of the worlds is tremulous with 
adoration, silent or expressed, to the Lamb. . . . 
And here it is, on a low scale and in a small way, 
that we discover how great a thing it is to have had 
one perfect being living in our world, namely, the 



m A STATE OP PRAISE 353 

God-man, Jesus Christ, whom, though here he lived 
in our human moulds and human ranges of life, we 
may extol and praise and worship no matter how 
adoringly. And when we do it, how fast do we climb 
by the greatness of our praise and the greatness of 
the Lord to whom it is given. What a more than rit- 
ual contrivance, too, this incarnate Word and Lord, 
to reinspire and new-create the world! And yet we 
need to see even him in the condition of state also, 
at the right hand of the Father exalted, that our low 
thoughts may drop out of us, and that we may wor- 
ship him in the undiminished glory of his eternal 
beauty and perfection. And then what a thought 
is it, after our great Lord is thus ascended, that we 
have at the head of the spiritual universe a grand 
central Spirit of Life, infinite in all great qualities 
and perfections, known to all created minds, to be 
the common joy and praise of all, one too that we] 
have learned to know by his conduct in our human' 
conditions and have received into our feeling by his' 
blessed human charities ! If it be something for the 
worlds to have a Jesus, what is it to all these other-' 
wise random, objectless hearts in the spiritual uni- 
verse to have a God, high enough, pure enough in 
excellence, dear enough in his great glory, to sup- 
port and lift and hallow their eternal praises? 

And this is all that is required of you in your con- 
version to the Lord. It is that you come into the 
joy and give utterance to the praise, when the ob- 
ject of praise shines full and glorious upon you. 
Adore the adorable, enjoy the infinite joy, and noth- 
ing more is required. And this, forget it not, this 



354 EXISTENCE CONSUMMATED 

is the perversity of your sin, that you stand off from 
all the joys of all the praises of the worlds. 

My brethren, if you want to know whether the 
life of God is in you and whether the power of a 
genuine efficiency is in your piety, ask yourself this 
question: Do you live in praise? Living Chris- 
tians are much in the way of praise. They deal in 
psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and 
making melody in their hearts unto the Lord. They 
have come near enough to him to have the sense of 
him and the power of his beauty upon them, and 
their hearts break into melody, whether their voices 
do or not. We have seen, too, that praise is not 
only a consequence of sanctification, but a cause of 
it; for that healing of the internal disorder, that 
pacifying of the wars, that unifying of the distracted 
members is just what praise is ever working in souls. 
It is the Christians who are never lubricated by the 
gladness of praise that have no growth ; because their 
heart also is not really fixed, but only bent a little to 
God. They are dull therefore and dry, and there 
is no ring of melody in their hearts. They mope 
and go along mournfully with sad faces, or they 
wear a look severe, austere and morbid. They serve 
God legally, go after him, not to admire and enjoy 
but to quail in painful dread. If they come to the 
matter of • prayer they fall instinctively to suppli- 
cating, and stay fast in it. They desire, petition, 
ask, beg, entreat, turn the supplication round and 
round, saying: " Give, still give." O, if they had a 
heart-full in them of the good God and Christ, how 
they w^ould break out here and there into a phrasing 



m A STATE OF PRAISE 355 

of tenderness or the ringing joy of praise! Their 
prayers would sometimes rise, ere they knew it, 
into hymns and hallelujahs. Make much of praise. 
Dare to be in it and full of it. Bring it into your 
families. Train your children in it and by it. The 
Moravians feed their children, we may almost say, on 
praise, and they grow up in it as the nurture indeed 
of the Lord. Understand, also, that it is not the 
downcast, dreary, unsmiling, unblessed hacks of 
duty, if I may use a term so hard, that do good in 
the world. The Christians that do good carry good 
along with them, in words of cheer and tokens of 
happy life, that are evidences for them and the truth. 
Such the world can believe, for they can see the 
heaven that is coming in their faces, and hear it in 
their voices even now. If, then, you have never a 
Hallelujah, never feel inclined to speak adoringly, 
never seem to be a harp just waiting to sound, think 
poorly of what you call your piety. There is cer- 
tainly not much of heaven in it. And if the grand 
felicity of the blessed minds and worlds centres in 
praise, there can be no genuine life in you unless it 
makes you a praising creature. 

O, to be clear of a world full of evils, errors, dis- 
gusts, where criticism, separation, avoidance, oppo- 
sition and argument are the great occupations of 
life, and to come out into a full praising state, where 
the soul takes possession of all by enjoyment of un- 
stinted praise! What liberty, what a bursting of 
boundaries! What fulness of life! Thither, my 
dear friends, into that glorious land of All-praise let 
us hasten, in that final reunion to meet. !N"o matter 



356 EXISTENCE CONSUMMATED 

wliether it be sung with voices or reverberated only 
in the niiuttered thunders of our praising hearts, — 
Blessing, honor, glory, power, — the home and rest 
of our eternity is praise. 



KEVELATIOlsr * 

I cannot close without expressing a sublime hope 
concerning revelation and the progress of Christian 
doctrine yet to be realized. This is the third chap- 
ter of revelation of which I spoke. First, I showed 
you the types of nature exalted into terms or figures 
of truth. IsText I showed you the extra-natural 
types prepared in the Old Testament and exalted 
into terms of spiritual Christian truth. Next I have 
to speak of the scientific types or the inner types of 
nature, which are also to support a higher language 
and complete the grand system of revelation. When 
astrology becomes astronomy, when alchemy be- 
comes chemistry, then the disciples agree; because 
science being over them as law, not under them as 
opinion, commands agreement. Religious and moral 
truth is not yet a science, as we see by the thousand 
opinions warring on every side. But the day is ap- 
proaching when religion will take the position of a 
science and command the united assent of all good 
men. And this will come to pass not by some possi- 
bility introduced or found out of expressing truth 
independent of forms or figures, for that can never 
be. The day of dogmatism will never come. But 
it will come to pass through the progress of natural 

♦ Closing paragraphs from an address delivered before the Porter 
Rhetorical Society at Andover, Mass., September 3, 1839. 

357 



858 REVELATION 

science. Tlie first order of language was built on 
the superficial types of nature. It reflected a flat 
world, not a solid orb. But now astronomy lias bung 
up the round orb, perfect in its orbit and exact in its 
mute revelations. Chemistry has dissolved its par- 
ticles and settled their affinities. Mineralogy has 
disinterred its crystal forms and squared them by 
the laws of geometry. Geology has been down into 
the fiery cave of Enceladus and counted the ribs of 
the world. Vegetable life has revealed its laws. 
The beasts, birds, and insects have come into the 
bosom of science, as they did into the ark. The 
whole world in short is undergoing a re-survey, in 
which its inner types are to be revealed. And what 
shall be the effect of this? Nothing less, I am con- 
fident, than that we shall look on religious truth 
with views as much more settled and clear as we do 
already on the truths of nature. Every one of these 
inner types of the world is destined, as science be- 
comes familiar, to be wrought into moral language. 
And truth, lying no longer in mere superficies, will 
beam out into a full orb of consistent, permanent 
knowledge. The inner laws of nature penetrating 
language will impart laws to it, and it will take an 
orbit and obey a rule determined thereby. What I 
here suggest has been already accomplished to a 
greater extent than many suppose, and for this rea- 
son there has never been an age of the world in 
which moral terms were as determinately held as 
now. As an example, I may say that love to God is 
the gravitating principle of the moral universe, and 
challenge anyone to express the same thought in 



REVELATION 359 

language older tlian tlie Newtonian system. Be- 
sides there is an influence on language apart from 
this, in the mere principle of association, which 
makes it certain that when the world begins to think 
definitely of nature, it will also think definitely in 
moral subjects, and language will receive steadiness 
from this source. It is often said that the world 
has been contending for 6,000 years about religious 
and moral truth and established nothing. But un- 
til within half a century, be it remembered, there 
has been as much division as loose and frivolous 
opinion held about nature. Settle the interpreta- 
tion of nature. Penetrate the solid, bring out the 
inner types of matter, which is first in order, and the 
high principles of our spiritual life will come in due 
time. We may anticipate the day, and we must do 
it with a joy not to be expressed, when contention 
shall cease, when men will understand each other, 
when the good shall be honored, the evil hated, the 
false discarded; when government will be equity, 
philosophy truth, religion love; when beauty will 
walk the earth immortal and the whole temple of 
being glow with the sovereign light of God's intelli- 
gence. 

[The address, from which the foregoing paragraphs are 
taken, was written in great haste, owing to some misunder- 
standing as to the date of delivery. The author wrote on 
the cover of the MS. : "Learned on Sunday night that I 
was to deliver my address on Tuesday afternoon, — only 
one or two pages written. Monday, shut myself in all 
day, jumped into the stage at sundown, ink wet, rode all 
night to Worcester, arrived at Andover just before [the 
mid-day] dinner, immediately after went in and delivered 
these crudities,"] 



OBLIGATIOI^ IMPEKATIVE 
Psalm cxix. 89. (1853.) 

How blessed a thing it is to have something fixed, 
settled forever bj God's will and put beyond debate. 
Here we come away from the rumor of tongues, the 
rage of disputants, the overturning and revolutions 
of opinions, and find a point established which no 
argument or violence can reach, that which suffers 
no amendment and submits to no assault, whether of 
malice or of argument. O, I thank God that there 
is a something undebatable, a throne that will reign, 
a word that is settled forever, a sovereignty whose 
will is the determinate order of reason, a shore 
against whose steady continents the wild oceans of 
human wrath may beat and upon which they must 
finally sink to rest ! God grant that on these conti- 
nents of his eternal will our feet may all be set in 
the firmness of an enduring and settled obedience. 

How blessed also is it that what is most of all 
needful, most practical, most fundamental to char- 
acter and social order, is most imperative, namely, the 
word of truth and the word of duty! There is but 
one truth, even that which was settled in heaven be- 
fore the world was, and we have nothing to do but 
simply to find it. Had we only this on hand, aiDart 

360 



OBLIGATIOlSr IMPEEATIVE 361 

from all ambition, all bigotry, all prurient desires of 
novelty, this and nothing else, how simple a matter 
and how easy and plain it would be! And the sov- 
ereignty of duty is even more simple and direct, re- 
quiring no deep search to find it, but coming to us 
even of itself, to command us and turn us into the 
ways of blessing. Regarding all holy truth as set- 
tled forever in heaven, let it be our only desire to 
find it, never to invent or make it; and above all let 
us accustom ourselves to a ready and exact obedience 
to the sharp and positive sovereignty of duty, wait- 
ing to be commanded, walking ever at liberty be- 
cause we seek the precepts of God and make his stat- 
utes our song. As God has a will, let us rejoice in 
God's will; as he governs in a glorious and peremp- 
tory sovereignty of commandment, let it be ours 
every one to say : I come to do thy will, O , God. 
What kind of life so blessed, so ennobled in feeling, 
as that which consciously walks in a divine calling, 
follows a divine appointment, engaged in works and 
duties that were settled forever in heaven, God's 
own eternal plan, made up for his servant to be the 
divine charter of his life. So great a thing it is to 
live in duty and be commanded by the directing 
wisdom of God's eternal will. And then, holding 
such relations to all truth and duty, what firnmess 
and greatness, what springs of peace and blessing 
are unfolded in a character established in the order 
of God's law. Society, too, — what were society but 
a chaos of misrule and wrong, were it not for this 
imperative rule of law, established in men's convic- 
tions! Were it as firmly established in their actions 



362 HUMAN PERSONALITY 

and tlie free consent of their wills, what scenes of 
love and beauty would the earth display! A simple 
glance in this direction — how much does it reveal, in 
the gift of God's settled word and law to the world! 
How much of what is most valuable, most necessary 
to character and righteousness among men, depends 
on the single fact that God's imperative will is laid 
upon us ! 



huma:^ persoitality 

Matt. xxv. 31. (1858.) 

It is one of the paradoxes of evil or sin that while 
it consists in centring everything in self and mak- 
ing everything subservient to our own personality, 
it breeds a tendency at the same time to sink our 
personality or even to speculatively deny it. For 
how could we get anything by sin if we did not 
serve ourselves in it. And how else could we jus- 
tify our sin, if we took the responsibility of our ac- 
tions upon us? Thus we break down even God's 
law to serve ourselves and then, to parry his condem- 
nation or the dread of it, we hide ourselves, pretend- 
ing that we are only things after all, not persons. 

How great and appalling a matter it is, when right- 
ly viewed, to live! To be a thing of any kind, no 
matter how vast or, physically speaking, how impor- 
tant, nay, to be the sun itself, is in one view noth- 
ing, actually and exactly nothing, to itself; but to be 
a person gifted with the liberty of choice, a power 



HUMAN PERSONALITY 363 

to do and be and become responsible in terms of 
eternity for what he becomes, this can be thought 
of rationally only as a truth most appalling. And 
yet there is a most inviting grandeur in the thought. 
iNTothing after that in life is mean or low. And we 
are all put by it very much on the same level. Hence 
in part the liberty and personal dignity developed 
under Calvinism, which it must be granted, however 
much we blame it in other respects, (for it certainly 
is no law to anyone,) has brought forth a most in- 
tense conception of our personal individuality. And 
the truth took body just here, at the point of a sole, 
unchurchly, distinctively personal responsibility to 
God. For this makes everything in us and about us 
great, and tones all personal dignity and holy virtue 
up to its highest possible key. So good it is and 
healthful and manfully invigorating to know and be- 
lieve, yea, and to always feel that we are every one 
of us to give account of himself to God. Whole 
worlds of truth lie here, and fields of holy character 
spread round, where noblest victories are to be won 
and highest crowns achieved, l^ever permit your- 
selves, my friends, to deny for one moment your 
personality, never suffer even a pretence that you 
are only a thing. It is an insult to your dignity, a 
shame put on your glorious nature, that lets you 
down to yourself and blurs all that is noblest in the 
gift of your soul. Be a person, face the judgment, 
consent to it, and have it as the blessed mark of your 
high calling to be ready. 



364: GOD'S CALL TO DECISION 

GOD'S CALL TO DECISIOIST 
Luke xv. 18. (1851.) 

Let this truth be always impressed upon you, that 
whatever dissatisfaction or hunger, or impatience 
with self or life, or bad and painful conviction you 
suffer, there is something to be done called for. As 
the prodigal began to be in want, muttered sorrow- 
fully over the husks on which he was feeding, re- 
flected on the fulness of his father's house, and, com- 
ing at last to himself, decided to arise and go back 
to his father, so it is in this true parable that we call 
life — the bitter experience connects with action, 
which if it do not come as the result of it, you must 
fail of all the good intended for you in it. 

GOD'S WAYS DISCOYEEABLE TO PIETY 

PSAliM cxi. 3. (1850.) 

How easy for modern science to cover even the 
sublimity of the poet with mockery, and make 
his words a mark for derision! And yet it may 
be that he discovers more and higher things and 
enters deeper into the secret of God's works than 
if he had all the mysteries of science in his 
power and had nothing else. Nay it may be that he 
sees and takes into his feeling just that in which all 



GOD'S WAYS DISCOVERABLE 36^ 

explorations of science are to have their final issue 
and their most glorious consummation, precisely that 
which it is the weakness and pity of all science mere- 
ly physical that it does not see, and in the pride of 
its wisdom cannot find. For to know matter simply 
as matter, laws simply as laws, or even to know the 
mechanical and physical uses of things and nothing 
more and higher^ is indeed to miss of all that is most 
significant and loftiest in them. After all, the great 
thing is that which Lord Bacon proposes, to find the 
" stamps and signatures of the Creator upon his 
creatures,'' not to find simply what the creatures are 
in themselves. It is to behold the face of the Crea- 
tor in his works. Thus it is and only thus that they 
are truly comprehended. True science ends where 
the holy poet begins, climbing up through experi- 
ment and labor of reason into that which faith seizes 
by a divine insight. The philosopher proves what 
the seer sees, — God, the inworking spirit of all work, 
the dominating force of all law, the underlying sys- 
tem of all system. 

We must not imagine that because science is last 
or latest in time it is therefore highest, for it may be 
that God only designs by it to verify and conduct us 
more easily to that which is first apprehended by 
faith, that is, himself — the reality and ground of all 
realities and the highest possibility of knowledge. 
So that atheistic science, or that which stops short of 
God and rests in the mere understanding of things 
as things only, stays at the alphabet without reading 
the book, and accepts a medial knowledge as nobler 
than that of which it is the means. 



366 MORALITY AND RELIGION 

MOKALITY Al^D EELIGIOiN^ 
Psalm cxix. 9. (1854.) 

The impulses in a life of religion are free, inspir- 
ing, elevating and akin to all greatness. It is not 
as when you are goading yourself by instigations of 
fear, prudence, appearances, rewards. The joy of 
the Lord is your strength. You live in his divine 
freedom, because like a gale of life he is wafting you 
on, raising you to a higher sense of yourself and fill- 
ing you with glorious impulse from the central heat 
of his own divine love and character. It is that kind 
of impulse which neither frets nor wears away your 
life by the little fumes and tumults it raises within; 
but it begets in you at once repose and energy. Here 
is the great and sad defect of any and all mere moral 
methods, that they furnish no inspiration. They have 
the same relation to religion that the treadmill has 
to the foot excursion, or the military drill to the bat- 
tle. 'No man is weaker than one that labors at the 
work of making virtue. He is discouraged by past 
failures, anxious for such as are future, wants mo- 
mentum and true fire in all. But where the spirit 
of the Lord is, there is liberty. And where there is 
liberty, all the wheels are lubricated in the easy play 
of its joy. And then it results that there is noth- 
ing artificial in the character produced. It has the 
appearance of a second nature which is not less nat- 
ural than the first, because it is a growth, the quick- 
ening as it were of a new divine life. Being shaped 



MORALITY AND RELIGION 367 

by no minute self-superintendence, but resulting 
from the inward devotion of the whole nature to 
God, it grows outward as it were from unconscious 
roots in the soul, and instead of appearing to be only 
a laborious aggregation or piling up of the subject's 
own industry it reveals a certain divine aspect of 
health and vitalized unity. The painful thing in re- 
gard to all self -created virtue is that it has a look of 
mockery. It is a mask and not a face. But relig- 
ion, as a new creating power of life, turns out faces 
and characters fully organized, having ears of docil- 
ity and eyes of intelligence and all the lineaments 
of life's expression. 



THE WAR OF OUK DESIRES 
James iv. 3. (1848.) 

We have no right to allow the desire of anything 
as for ourselves — I mean, of course, for ourselves as 
an end. If I desire food or sleep or grace, it is in 
one view for myself and is desired as for myself. 
But in another view it must not be as for myself at 
all. That is, I must not take myself as a centre, out 
of God, and desire with a desire that terminates in 
myself. I must desire as being in God and under 
God and as existing for God. God must be the final 
end of all my desires, the centre about which they 
all gather and move. If I want food or rest or 
light, it must be not as a self-seeker but as a seeker 
of God. Self-love must not be the hinge of my de- 



368 THE WAR OF OUR DESIRES 

sires, but they must be hung about the person and 
the government of God. I must not even desire 
holiness as a something to be had for my own sake. 
But I must see myself as in God, and desire in and 
through the desires of God. Our desires must take 
their centre in the same manner in God, and flow in 
the very channels of the desires of God. And we 
must cease from every desire as terminating in and 
upon ourselves. 

And this it is, I suppose, which some call ceasing 
to have any desires. Call it rather the beginning 
to have boundless and divine desires. For though 
the soul just there comes into rest and imagines that 
she ceases to desire or think anything in particular, 
it is because the whole universe of good is in her 
heart. She rests in God because the full current 
of God's desires flows in her, and so floating in the 
full current, as a boat upon a river, she seems to be 
at rest. If she desired less, then she would seem to 
desire more; for one desire hovering around self 
makes more of inward commotion and seems to 
the soul a more hungry state than a whole Amazon 
of desire flowing in coincidence with the desires of 
God. And this it is that tosses and angers the world 
so painfully, this that makes the wars, tumults, tur- 
moils, envies, and inward distractions of the world, 
— it is that we have such little desires and these so 
contradictory one to another. We say that we are 
too ambitious, too grasping, desire too much. 'Noy 
the mischief is that instead of one boundless full 
sweep of desire vested in the fulness of God, we 
have so many little, petty, termagant desires, that 



THE WAR OF OUR DESIRES 369 

are hovering as cormorants and howling as jackals 
,about ourselves. So we fret, tear, chafe, each man 
with himself, and struggle, pull, quarrel with each 
other. Just as a famine makes men fierce and 
bloody, so our starveling desires set us all at war 
with each other. Whereas if our desires were 
fuller, as full and boundless as God's, therefore one 
with his, we should have his peace and rest in it, as 
the drops of a shower all rest in the river into which 
they fall and flow on with it to the sea. 

'No one is called in the name of duty or piety to 
God to extinguish his personality. To have no de- 
sires is to be a stone, not a man. To fall into God, 
and there in literal truth to become inert and cease 
from all real movement of soul, is Brahminism, not 
Christ, not Christianity. ISTo one who sleeps in 
Brahma bears the cross of Christ. For just as a sail 
flutters and flaps against the cordage when there is 
no wind, but sleeps in its place when the wind is full, 
so our little selfish desires keep us chafing and wear- 
ing and produce no motion, when the full breezes of 
the divine feeling sweeping through our spirit would 
give us rest and motion together. And such rest as 
this annihilates nothing in us but evil. We exist as 
truly as before, only we exist in a thousand-fold 
higher degree. There is so much more of us than 
there was, that when we look for our former self it 
is gone, we cannot find it. 

It is the very life of the soul to feel, desire, love, 
to stretch itself out in holy yearnings after all good. 
Taking its centre in God, it needs to go forth thence 
in the desire of God and partake the universality, 



370 THE SMALL SAINTS 

the immensity of his goodness. Indifference is 
death, so is all stoicism and, as far as it partakes of 
insensibility, quietism also. 

THE SMALL SAIJ^TS THAT AKE 1^0 
SAINTS 

Matt. v. 19. (1851.) 

When we consider who the Christian is, a man 
new-created in God's image, born of God's Spirit 
and raised up to the participation of God's own lib- 
erty, when we consider in what grace he believes, 
and by what secret force of God he is endued for 
the conquest of the world, we look to see him do 
great things. His very call is to be a man and be 
strong, to fill a large place and carry great victories 
by his courage and devotion. O, if every young be- 
liever, girding himself in the true enthusiasm, could 
go forth and take his privilege and never falter, 
what a mark of honor would he be to the whole host 
coming after, what inspirations would he kindle! 
"What is there in fact which a great living army thus 
raised up would not be able to do? 

At this point let me correct a very great mistake 
into which we often fall. We think and speak of 
great lapses, scandals, vices, profligate sins, as the 
only or principal crimes of discipleship. No, far 
from that as possible, the great, broad, sweeping 
crime, the crime most desolating and most hateful, 
I am persuaded, to God, is the crime of not living so 
as to grow, the crime of being only dwarfs in that 
which ought to make us heroes. This puny figure, 



THAT ARE NO SAINTS 371 

in whicli we live and under which we draw away and 
die, is a kind of standing lie against the gospel. 
That which onght to make us great in the kingdom 
makes us neither great nor a kingdom. Is there any 
greater crime than that which even dishonors and 
shames the kingdom of God? True, it is a crime 
of weakness that I speak of here ; but there is no so 
great crime as to be weak and little when God calls 
us to grow and be strong. 

THE con:n^ectio^^s of pkayek 

Acts x. 17. (1853.) 

All true prayers are immortal, a living power that 
never dies or goes out, and that sends out its fire into 
the earth forever after. Had you a sainted father 
who, you could wish, might still pray for you, left 
here as you are to struggle in your rough warfare 
alone, he did and therefore does and will; for what- 
ever he sought of God in your behalf, the odors of 
the golden vials are still suing round the throne, in 
fragrant breathings of desire, to obtain for you. It 
is just as if the Christian ancestors and friends you 
have among the blessed were making their united in- 
tercession for you; for as they are present all with 
Christ and established there in power, so the right- 
eous prayers they offered are remembered and for 
their sakes will be regarded. 

Consider again the very tender relation of the 
present to the past, the guilty present to the holy 
and now glorified past. We are the inheritors of 



372 THE CONNECTIONS OF PRAYER 

their prayers, and the heritage is one that enters into 
all the combinations of causes in which we live. We 
live in fact embosomed in their prayers. And not 
only are they winding their cords of love about us 
in all we experience, but the present counsel of God 
respects the prayers, letting them distil unseen upon 
us in streams of blessing from his throne. We know 
the past but a little way back; all but two or three 
generations of those who have entered into their 
glory are strangers to us, we never saw them and 
perhaps never heard their names. They seem to be 
quite separated from us, but they prayed for us and 
that connects us ever with them. Time is nothing 
in this count, time never kills a prayer. A thousand 
years no more separate them from us than the four 
days separated Cornelius and Peter. E^either is it 
anything that they are in heaven and we on earth, 
any more than that one man is at Cesarea and an- 
other at Joppa. God holds connections still between 
us, and all their prayers for us are a heritage laid up 
for us before him, and a power descending in holy 
streams of history upon us, to water the desert in 
which we live and make the trees of healing blossom 
round us. We come into the world not as a vacant 
world, but as a temple filled with prayers and golden 
vials that exhale the spirit of the just. God remem- 
bers us for the godly fathers' and the godly mothers' 
sakes. They were his friends and, for the sake of 
his friends to whom he is ever faithful, he will cher- 
ish still their children of the coming generations and 
will keep them environed with his blessing. 

In this manner everything we know here on earth 



SPECIAL PRAYER 373 

is intermixed with good men's prayers and flavored 
by their fragrant odors. Even the most common 
things which the past has prepared for us by so many 
ages of industry and heroic sacrifice, the structures, 
institutions, laws, inventions of art, discoveries of 
science, works of genius, objects of beauty and 
scenes that gladden the eye, — all these have some 
kind of second baptism on them from the prayers of 
the past. Nothing stands in the same relations that 
it would if holy men had not lived here before us, 
breathing out their prayers and sending up to God 
through the air that bathes our faces the fragrant 
sighs of their petitions. As the bodies of the dead 
generations moulder back to dust in their graves, 
and the green earth looks more green upon the beds 
where they sleep, so in their sighs and godly petitions 
there is a living power entered into the world they 
have left behind them, to be a fertilizing grace in 
its bosom. 

SPECIAL PRAYEK 
John xiv. 13. (1849.) 

l!^otice how this ordinance and exercise of partic- 
ular prayer will affect the redemption of the fallen 
desires. In a soul under sin the desires are in total 
disorder, impatient, sour, corrupt, turbulent, pro- 
ducing a kind of frenzy by their ungoverned and ma- 
lign activity. At the same time they are narrowed 
and dwarfed and corrupted, they are made little, 
meagre, selfish and mean. If then the soul under 
sin is to be redeemed, the desires must be. They 



374 SPECIAL PRAYER 

must be purified, softened, elevated, brought up into 
union with truth, reason and God, — in this manner 
harmonized. They must also be enlarged and spir- 
itually ennobled; for great wants, such as yearn 
after the best and noblest and purest things, are the 
first essentials of all true spiritual greatness and 
character. 

See, then, how beautifully all this is wrought 
in us by means of prayer, as an article of God's re- 
demptive economy. Here we are invited to come 
to God with our desires and offer them to him, and 
if they are worthy, if they accord with the highest 
goodness and reason, he declares that he will give 
us what we ask for. And so he is training our de- 
sires into coincidence even with his own, teaching 
us to have pure desires, such as are unworldly, un- 
selfish, merciful, patient, such as by their essential 
goodness, volume and vastness partake even of a di- 
vine quality. The whole process of prayer draws 
in this direction; it is an appointment admirably 
planned to effect a redemption of our fallen desires, 
to elicit and nourish such as are good, to fine away 
such as are evil and fallen, and so at last to deliver 
us completely from the sad brood of shame that sin 
has gendered in us. 

And then, as our desires are redeemed, so or by 
the same process of prayer are we brought into a 
closer and more conscious as well as more practical 
union to God. For the desires we have, when they 
are pure and right, are so many ties or filaments, con- 
necting us with the person of God. And God en- 
deavors in the spiritual economy of prayer to multi- 



SPECIAL PRAYER 375 

ply these filaments and knit us more immovably to 
his throne. So he says, " Ask and ye shall receive/' 
provoking in us all kinds of merciful and good de- 
sires, that by these he may draw us to himself in 
closer ties of mutuality, of want and benefaction. In 
this manner he lays even souls and churches on us 
as spiritual burdens, under which we may go into 
struggles of conflict and holy wrestling before him, 
and thus be made to gravitate with all the force in 
our nature toward his own person. And in this 
manner, as new desires are issuing from our hearts, 
he is winding them ever as new filaments of want 
and dependence round his throne. 

He listens to the very breathing, so to speak, of 
our souls, becomes himself the spring and life of our 
desires, and so infuses himself into us by the double 
mercy of both shaping and feeding our desires, that 
we seem to have our life only in and upon his good- 
ness. 

HALF CON^YEKTED 
Matthew xii. 44. (1857.) 

How honorable a thing it is for religion that it pro- 
poses not to empty but to fill! Some of you are 
looking on it perhaps as a mere privation principle, 
and it really seems that you cannot make the choice 
of it or hope to stand fast in it because you cannot 
endure so great privation. It will make your life 
a desolation or a desert, and how can you ever be 
content with it? 'No, you never can be if that is 
the true meaning of it, as it certainly is not. GIq- 



376 HALF CONVERTED 

riously different from that is the true gospel idea. 
It undertakes to fill all souls that believe, even up 
to the brim of their capacity. It is no mere priva- 
tive grace, but a positive, and counts nothing 
really done till the poor sad soul of sin is full and 
free. It is no taxation principle, but a principle of 
bestowment, and its measures of bestowment are the 
measures of Christ and of God, — length, breadth, 
depth, height, more than we can comprehend or 
know, a fulness which is all the fulness of Grod. 

And this, my friends, is the true conception of 
God's meaning in this new life to which we are called. 
"We are never to be straitened in it or scanted in the 
soul-food of our naturally hungering mind. We meet 
the discovery in it of God, rest in the peace of God, 
drink of God's unthirsting fulness, leap up in the joy 
of God. We are to be strong, and that everlasting- 
ly. Our capacity is to be brimming full, and not 
only so, it is to be carefully expanded or enlarged. 
Strange, O, strange indeed that we go starving as we 
do, when God's high purpose and calling for us is so 
very different! These blessed, everlasting possibil- 
ities! In these green pastures and beside these still 
waters, which are God himself and God's own love, 
we need never speak of dryness again, or hunger or 
the defect of any real satisfaction. Our very feed- 
ing is peace and our peace is like a river; and as 
rivers do not halt in their courses because their at- 
tractions keep them onward, so may we be drawn 
after God unceasingly, even as they are to the sea, 
because the currents of our inclination are thither- 
ward and the fulness of our life is there. 



THE GOOD WINE LAST 377 



THE GOOD WINE LAST * 

And saith unto him, Every man at the beginning doth 
set forth good wine ; and when men have well drunk, then 
that which is worse ; but thou hast kept the good wine 
until now. — John ii. 10. 

The feast master notes a remarkable distinction 
here. According to the custom of entertainments, 
the host arranges to set the choicest wine before his 
guests when their taste is fresh. Afterward, when 
it is blunted or disguised by one or two draughts, he 
gives them any poorest product of the vintage and 
they do not know the difference. But here the good 
wine is kept till the last, as if it were even a design 
to symbolize the ascendancy of some other law. In- 
stead of beginning with the guest as if he were a 
man, and finishing with him as if he were, — no mat- 
ter what — another and more honorable kind of hos- 
pitality is observed: that which symbolizes an ever- 
sharpening relish, a growing appetite, a continually 
ascending capacity of enjoyment. 

The immense reach of the subject here presented 
may not be at first view apparent. And yet there 
are few of you, I presume, who have not sometimes 
thought of the intense significance of our wants, and 
how much they have to do with our advancement in 
all matters of condition, culture and happiness. 
You have remarked that the people who have the 
greatest wants are commonly most advanced in con- 

* The sermon from which these extracts are made was probably 
written about 1853 or 1854, date not given in the MS. 



378 THE GOOD WINE LAST 

dition or, to state the real paradox as it is, are com- 
monly richest. Thus if we take a savage people 
or a people who have lived the life of a herd, such as 
those who have grown up in slavery, the first thing 
to be done with them in raising them is to give them 
wants; for as soon as they take up the civilized 
wants, house, dress, furniture, a table, property, 
neatness, order, good manners, character, — as soon 
as these become wants the great obstacle to their 
civilization is surmounted. Some kind of appetite 
is needed. I use the word here in its largest sense, 
as the previous condition of all application, charac- 
ter and progress; and there can be no such thing as 
an eternal growth or amplification unless there be 
some appetite or want provided to lead on the cause 
and swell the impulse of a progressive eternity. 

Here again you see how much is at issue in the 
subject; for if it be true that the world wears out 
the appetite which it feeds, and religion keeps it up 
in a state of eternal expansion, it is very clear that 
we strike a distinction here on which everything 
valuable in the grand experiment of our existence is 
at stake. If religion makes an eternal appetite, it 
is everything; if the world must take the good wine 
first or lose it, then it is nothing. And here we dis- 
cover plainly enough at a glance how it should be, if 
the mortal state is mortal and preparatory to an- 
other which is immortal. In that case, as the body 
is a mere thing or vehicle taken up in transit, it 
should be a thing under limitations of time in all its 
faculties. It would be a great hindrance to its uses 
if the appetites were insatiable and exhaustless. It 



THE GOOD WINE LAST 379 

should therefore be adjusted so as to have a short 
lease in all its pleasures, and so that if it is fresh at 
the beginning of the feast it will soon be cloyed and 
come to a full period in its relish of the viands tasted. 
The organs too should manifestly be tempered so 
as not to increase in their fervor of enjoyment or 
the intensity of appetite as age advances; but their 
force should be gradually blunted rather and worn 
away, and their stimulations less and less keenly 
felt, that the body may fall as it were into a 
secondary place, and the soul, now fully launched, 
become the forward interest. The flesh should be 
sobered, blunted and finally weakened, that the 
mind may be sharpened in its immortal appetite and 
made more and more distinctly conscious of its im- 
mortal wants. The body should be as the blossom 
that dies and falls off, while the fruit is setting and 
the eternal growth beginning to swell in its place. 
So, I say, it should be, on the supposition that we are 
in the body as a temporary experiment. And then 
it should follow, after the body is finally dead and 
separated, that there is an endless appetite prepared 
in the soul, one that will never be cloyed or sated, 
but will be eternally increasing in the intensity of 
its stimulating force and thrusting on the soul to 
greater works and higher enjoyments. So I say it 
should be, in case our view of life and its errand be 
true. What, then, are the facts? 

The organs of taste or the mere bodily appetites 
are sharper first, sharper in youth than in age, 
sharper at the beginning of the feast than at the end. 
But how different is it with us in the matters of the 



380 THE GOOD WINE LAST 

mind. Study makes an appetite for study, knowl- 
edge for knowledge, discovery for discovery. Every 
taste is intensified by exercise. Culture makes some 
higher culture a want, enlargement starts a longing 
to be enlarged. Truth never wears out the mind 
or diminishes the appetite for truth. Honor does 
not weaken or cloy the desire of honor, but makes 
it even a necessity. Beauty, having stolen into the 
soul and smiled upon it, kindles a sacred enchant- 
ment which is never dissolved, but grows more pow- 
erfully year by year. There is no necessity here to 
give the good wine first, for the relish grows and 
every scene or object that ravishes the mind only 
prepares it to the higher ravishment of that which is 
a higher charm. So it is with the pursuit of justice 
or of purity, so with the experience of benevolence 
and of liberty, so with the enjoyment of music, 
painting, poetry. There is nothing in the world of 
mind or feeling or taste which does not rouse a new 
degree of appetite and make men capable of a new 
intensity ol pleasure, through use and exercise and 
pleasure received or awakened. In all which it is 
seen that as we approach the domain of religion, for 
in one view these are all included in that domain, we 
discover what may be called, as regards the mere 
body, an inverted order of appetite. For as that is 
under a law of decrease, so the soul in all these fields 
more properly its own is under a law of increase; 
not sated or cloyed by indulgence, not worn out or 
blunted by use, but appetized, if I may use that 
word, more and more intensely, growing by that 
which feeds it. 



THE GOOD WINE LAST 381 

But not to remain longer without and at a dis- 
tance from the truth, let us come into the very 
matter of experience itself. What man ever found 
that his want of God was blunted or diminished by 
the possession of his friendship ? Who that has been 
taken with the honor and confidence of God has been 
finally sated by it and ceased to have the appetite? 
When has the communion of God satisfied or worn 
out the capacity of communion? In what Christian 
bosom has the hope of the life to come drugged the 
mind and turned it away from its heavenly anticipa- 
tions? And when a Christian has been faithful to 
Christ, doing and suffering all things for his sake, 
in what single instance has Christ ceased to be the 
passion that he was, in what has he not become a 
holier, deeper passion, filling and firing every aspira- 
tion, aim, power, purpose and work of the life? 

And so it is universally, as everyone knows who 
has any experience of religion at all. The more we 
pray the more we want to, and the more necessary 
prayer becomes. The more we love the more we can, 
and the more we are impelled to it by the sacred joy 
it gives. The deeper we go into God's truth, the 
more insatiate is our longing for it. The more iden- 
tified in feeling we are with God's honor the more 
necessary it becomes to us. The more we hunger 
and thirst after God, and indeed the more we are 
filled, the vaster hunger and the deeper thirst have 
we as capacities for a joy so exalted. Everything we 
do in God's service becomes a taste, a want, a pas- 
sion. Appetite is kindled every hour by the duties 
and the joys received, and so the ability to be blessed 



882 THE GOOD WINE LAST 

is all the while increased. "We nowhere take the best 
first and finish with that which is poorest; but we 
have a relish for the best things continually growing 
in us. The stimulus of the eternal appetite grows 
strong and the divine afiinity grows clear. We are 
more eager not less, and the impulse by which we are 
moved gathers volume and momentum by the move- 
ment made. We can see, in short, as plainly as we 
can see anything, that the order of Cana holds good 
in everything Christ does for us. He makes us capa- 
ble always of something better and keeps our holy 
appetite continually sharpening, so that we may 
have our best last, even to the end and forever. 



PART IV 

MISCELLANIES 



A MAEEIAGE CEREMONY 

[To the Guests.] 

When Jesus was called and his disciples to the 
marriage he gladly met the call, and there began his 
ministry and his acts of power. Thus also are we 
here assembled, to be witnesses after him of the 
pledges this man and this woman are now to make 
to each other, and to set them forth in their new es- 
tate of wedlock by our prayers and Christian greet- 
ings. 

[To the Parties.] 

This rite of marriage in which you twain come 
now to be united, as in bonds of religion, is the first 
and oldest rite of the world, celebrated in the world's 
beginning before God, the Creator, himself sole Wit- 
ness, Guest and Priest. And what it then was, 
it now is; marriage has never fallen, but is what of 
Paradise lives over, continued still by God, to soothe 
the troubles and comfort the sorrows of our broken 
state. This it will be to you, if you have it in your 
hearts to beautify and sweeten it by your tender as- 
siduities, your mindfulness in little things, your pa- 
tiences and sacrifices of self to each other. All 
which I charge it on you here in God's name to re- 
member ; which also, as you will ever pray for, your- 
selves, performing faithfully your vows, you will 
now join your right hands. 

S85 



386 A MARRIAGE CEREMONY 

[To the Man.] 

Will you (A. B.) take this woman whom you hold 
by the hand to be your wedded wife; promising to 
keep, cherish, and defend her and to be her faithful 
and true husband so long as you both shall live ? 

[Kesponse.] I will. 

[To the Woman.] 

Will you (C. D.) take this man whom you hold by 
the hand to be your wedded husband; promising to 
adhere unchangeably to him in all life's changes, and 
to be his loving and true wife till death divide you? 

[Eesponse.] I will. 

[For the Ring.] 

Here the man should give the ring to the minister. 

Forasmuch now as the husband is the head of the 
wife, imparting unto her his name and receiving her 
into his care and providence, I give you this ring 
[giving the ring to the man] that you may place it 
on the finger of this woman, as a token that in troth 
you so receive her. 

Here the ring is placed and held. 

Thus are yon to compass about her life with 
strength and protecting love. 

Thus are you to wear this ring as the enclosing 
bond of reverence and dearest faith, both fulfilling 
the perfect circle of duty that makes you one. 



A MARRIAGE CEREMONY 387 

[The Pronouncement.] 

In the name then of Jesus Christ and before God 
and these witnesses, I pronounce you husband and 
wife. What God hath joined together, let not man 
put asunder. 



Prayer is now offered, followed hy 

[The Benediction.] 

And now may he who walked in visible converse 
with the first human pair in the days of their inno- 
cence; and he who coming in sorrow made the mar- 
riage feast to rejoice by his miraculous ministry; 
and he who dwelling in your hearts can make your 
house a habitation of love and peace, — the Father, 
Son and Holy Ghost be with you evermore. Amen. 



A GKOUP OF LETTEKS 
To His Children. 

Saratoga, July 15, 1839. 
Deae L., — I thank you very much for your sweet 
little letter. If you learn to read and write, you 
will be able very soon to write me little letters with 
your own hand. I hope you are learning very fast. 
I shall be at home in just a week more, and I hope 
you will be so good all the time till then that your 
kisses will be very sweet to me. Good children, you 
know, give sweeter kisses by a great deal than bad 
ones. And God, my child, you know, will help you 
to be good if you wish to be. He has given you a 
good mamma, and a sweet little home, and a yard to 
play in, and everything to make you good and happy. 
Your father loves you more than he can tell you, 
and sends his thoughts away in the night into your 
chamber where you sleep, and prays God to bless 
you. Good-by, my child ! A kiss. 

YouE Father. 

Vermont, 1840. 
Dear L., — I told you that I would write you a 
letter, or a part of one. I have been looking out on 
the way to see if I could find any little L., and I have 

388 



TO CHILDREN 389 

seen only one that was at all like yon. I did see one 
little girl-face at the window that was so like yon 
that I really wanted to kiss her; bnt I conclnded not 
to stop the stage for it, and perhaps she wonld not 
have been willing if I had. Besides, it was not you, 
and it wonld have done me no good. I hope yon are 
as good as you know how to be, and that is very 
good indeed. I hope you will pray for your papa 
that God will keep him safe and show him what is 
his duty. So good-night. Your dear papa, 

H. BUSHNELL. 



Brockport, August 16, 1842. 
I should love, in this quiet, soft hour, to creep in 
upon the repose of the children, and go round from 
face to face as a night-elf, lighting softly on their 
lips and stealing the kisses. You should wake in the 
pleasant morning, and should not know what makes 
you all so happy — the gentle half-dream I might 
stir in your heads — stir, but not enough to make you 

recall it. Take care now, all of you, L , the 

little wheelbarrow gentleman, and the tiny-voiced 
lady that shouts " Papa " so musically, — one and all, 
take care, lest one of these nights there should be a 
thief among you. Cover your blessed faces, lest the 
night-bee should come without a buzz, feeling the 
flowers all over with his honey-tube, and robbing 
them when they do not know it. Stop the key-holes, 
bar the shutters, and burn a good strong light, for 
light, they tell us, is the greatest terror of thieves in 
the world. 



390 A GROUP OF LETTERS 

Hartford, July 23, 1843. 

My Deae Child, — I have been meaning for a long 
time to write you a letter, in return for the one you 
were so kind as to send me, but I have been so full 
of business since I came back that I have hardly 
been able to find time to sleep. I delight to hear of 
you often, as I do through your friends, and espe- 
cially to hear that you are doing so well in every re- 
spect, — attending earnestly to your studies, employ- 
ing your time carefully, and doing what you can to 
win the esteem of your good friends and compan- 
ions. Which do you think makes parents happiest, 
— ^to hear that their children are happy, or that they 
make others so? to hear that they are praised, or 
that they are good? to hear that they excel others, 
or make friends of them? And what do you think 
they love to hear most of all? 

My dear child, you are growing up into a woman 
very fast. I have a great desire that you should 
endeavor to make yourself the best and loveliest of 
women, to have a wise character, a gentle heart, 
pure and simple manners, and, in a word, be such 
that everybody will be your friend. 

I went, you know, to the great celebration at 
Bunker Hill, and there I saw a great many more 
people than you ever saw or thought of. It was a 
very noble sight to see so many people, and not see 
a bad-looking, wicked man among them. I saw a 
great many thousand little girl-faces there, too, from 
every window and balcony and roof and door-stone, 
all glistening with delight, swinging their white ker- 



TO CHILDREN 391 

cHefs, and saying right out by their joyful looks 
that they thought we had the best country in the 
world, and that that was the happiest day. 

Your own father, Horace Bushnell. 

Geneva, October 6, 1845. 
My Dear Child, — Your mother has said to me 
once or twice that you were preparing a letter for 
me. I should be most happy to receive one as good 
as you can write, — partly because I love you, and 
partly because it will do you good to compose it. I 
have thought many times of the possibility that I 
may never see you again; in which case I should 
wish very much to have left you a father's message 
and counsel; and it is this, in part, which moves me 
to write to you now. I expect of course to see you 
again after a few months are past; but you know, 
my dear child, that we are certain of nothing in this 
world. How much I long to see you I cannot tell. 
"No earthly prospect is so bright to me as to be once 
more in our pleasant, happy home, where I may 
hear the voices of my dear children, and see them 
gathered at our simple table, saying Father and 
Mother as before I left them. I think of you at 
night; every child and family calls you to mind by 
day. I tell the French people and the German peo- 
ple by signs, — for I cannot speak their language, — 
that I have three daughters at home, — one so long, 
another so long, and another so long. The fathers 
and mothers I find will understand me, for they 
know how fathers and mothers feel, and they show 
by their smile of sympathy how quick they are to 



392 A GEOUP OF LETTERS 

catch my meaning. Your dear mother tells me that 
you are now at your studies at home, and are doing 
well in them. This I rejoice to hear. I want to 
have you get a good knowledge of Latin and Greek, 
and then of French and German. The very first 
day that I went out in Geneva to call on a gentle- 
man, two lovely daughters were interpreters between 
me and their mother. They spoke English very well 
indeed; and it gave me so much happiness, as a lone- 
ly stranger unable to speak their language, that I 
could not but wish that my dear daughter might be 
able hereafter to make somebody else as happy as 
they made me and thus repay my obligations. You 
are now precisely of the age to study, and there is 
nothing I so much desire for you on earth as that 
you may have a truly accomplished mind and char- 
acter. I do not wish to excite in you any wrong or 
bad ambition, and yet I wish you to feel, as you 
grow up, that you are not doomed to any low or 
vain calling because you are a woman. I have no 
son upon whom I can lean, or in whose character 
and success I can find pleasure. God, you know, 
has taken away the one that was so dear to us all. 
Therefore I desire the more to have daughters whom 
I can respect, and in whose beautiful and high ac- 
complishments I can find a father's comfort. You 
cannot be a soldier or a preacher; but I wish in the 
best and truest sense to have you become a woman. 
This you cannot be without great and patient culti- 
vation of your mind; for neither man nor woman 
has any basis of character without intelligence. You 
must be able to maintain intelligent conversation; 



TO CHILDREN 393 

and this requires a great deal of intelligence of every 
sort, and the more in a woman, because she must 
not seem to be book-wise and scientific as men may 
do, but to have her fund in herself, and speak on all 
subjects as if she had the flavor of all knowledge in 
herself naturally. 

But if intelligence is necessary to make a fine 
woman, other things are quite as necessary. Her 
mind and heart must be perfectly pure, as that of in- 
fancy. She must be the very expression of modesty, 
and without the least affectation in her manners. 
Here the best rule is always to feel beautifully, 
and she will act beautifully of course; whereas 
if she undertakes to fashion her manners by rule 
or to copy others, she will as surely be stiff and af- 
fected. As to her looks, she will look best if she is 
never conscious that she has any looks at all, pro- 
vided only that she has enough beauty and refine- 
ment of feeling to clothe her person out of it; for 
dress itself is never happy or becoming if it is not 
the natural clothing of a lovely spirit. As to tem- 
per, a woman should never seem to have any. A 
sharp temper pricks through the garment of softness, 
and it seems to be only a covering of thorns, of 
which the observer will be duly cautious. She ought 
never to vent or entertain a harsh judgment of oth- 
ers, but to cast a mantle of sweetness and charity 
over all she looks upon; for harsh judgments savor 
of passion, and imply a kind of grossness which is 
unbecoming to a woman. Study contentment, look 
on nothing with envy; for it is half the merit of a 
fine woman that she can bear so much with so beau- 



394 A GROUP OF LETTERS 

tiful a spirit. The bright side of life is in her; 
therefore she is to make adversity and loss smile by 
her patience. The angel who comes down to cry 
peace and good-will to mortals must not fret himself 
because there are clouds in his way; and if his locks 
are wet by the rain or singed by the thunder, he will 
not justify the beauty of his message if he is not able 
still to smile and to sing. 

Do nothing to excite admiration, for that is the 
way to excite contempt, and what is more to deserve 
it. The woman who flatters and fawns and studies 
her methods to attract the admiration of others seems 
to ask for it, and in asking to confess that it can be 
gotten only by means that are without the scale of 
merit. The humblest flower is never so unwise. It 
gives out its colors and sheds its fragrance in the air 
because it has the secret stores of color and fragrance 
in its sap, and not to please some casual observer. 
Above all, the fine woman must be unselfish. We 
demand that she shall seem to have alighted here for 
the world's comfort and blessing, and all the ways of 
selfishness are specially at variance with her beauti- 
ful errand. 

I have said nothing thus far, my child, of what is 
the first and radical ground of security for all that I 
commend; namely, that a woman should be a Chris- 
tian. Her character should be the very blossom and 
flavor of piety. 'No goodness or beauty is truly nat- 
ural which is not the flower of this germ in the soul. 
Most men agree that a woman ought to be religious, 
in which they say more than they think, both for 
woman and for religion. What is that without which 



TO CHILDREN 395 

tlie most perfect loveliness cannot be made to sub- 
sist? And what is she whose character can be fin- 
ished only by assimilation to God? To be conscien- 
tious in duty, to go on errands of charity to the poor, 
to have the passions laid and the temper sweetened 
by a habit of prayer, to draw from the fountain of 
truth that truthful habit which expels all affectation 
and makes a creature at once confiding and worthy 
of confidence, — this is the soul of all that enters into 
a woman's accomplishments; and without this her 
accomplishments must want a soul, which is the most 
grievous of conceivable wants. Therefore I am anx- 
ious, my dear daughter, that you should begin the 
Christian life now and grow up in it. If I have pro- 
posed to you something angelic in the model of a 
woman, I am far enough from believing that any 
mere self-cultivation will enable you to reach it. 
Such is man and woman, such all human nature, 
that only grace can raise it into beauty and true 
goodness. Man is not so good or susceptible to good 
that he can fill out the ideal of goodness without 
proximity to God, or drawing himself up to his mark 
by the assimilating power of God's love and com- 
munion. Besides, I do not see that there is any- 
thing angelic in the earthly lot of either man or 
woman, unless that in the midst of much deformity 
and sorrow he may aspire to be an angel. 

In a few years, my child, I shall probably leave 
you and the world together. I know not what rough- 
ness may be in your lot after I am gone, or what 
wrongs and sorrows may fall upon you. And you 
must bear them as a woman. Your victory too will 



396 A GROUP OF LETTERS 

be a woman's only — the victory of patience, purity 
and goodness. God only can be your sufficient de- 
fender and upholder. And if, when all these earthly 
trials are over, I am ever to greet you in a better 
world, it will be only because we are sanctified by 
the spirit of God, and forgiven through his Son. 
Be it, then, your first thought to be religious. Let 
your childhood be religious, your girlhood and thus 
your womanhood, your whole life and thus your 
death and all beyond. 

I took up my pen not knowing that I was going 
to write you such a letter, but I had nearly finished 
before my candle burnt out. The language and the 
sentiments, I am aware, are often beyond your age. 
But your mother will interpret them. In the mean- 
time, as you grow older and more cultivated you will 
be able to see their meaning more perfectly, and, I 
hope, to respect them and value them more highly. 
I wish you to keep this letter as a father's counsel. 
It is written partly for the future. Perhaps when 
I am gone it will be the dearest remembrance I leave 
you. To God, my dear child, I commend you; with 
him I leave you. Farewell. Your loving, but not 
your best nor only Father, 

Horace Bushnell. 

My Dear Little M., — You say that you, too, 
want a letter from papa; and a little one will do, 
will it not? 

And what do you think are the sweetest violets, 
those that grow in the garden, or those that blossom 
in the heart and face of a good, little, loving child? 



TO CHILDREN 397 

When your dear father hears that you talk of him 
and remember him in your prayers, asking God to 
keep him and bring him safely back, there is no 
flower so bright or sweet as that. 

God bless you, my dear one, and keep you from 
all that is wrong, that you may always be the violet 
to your father. 

Hartford, January 17, 1848. 

My Dear Child, — You can hardly guess how 
much we miss you. When our little circle is gath- 
ered round the parlor fire at evening, we all take 
turns in saying, perhaps breaking silence to say, 

I wish now dear L was here. And the children 

ask moreover how long, how many months will it 
be before she comes home? And then I see how 
their souls are stretching and working after the meas- 
ures of time, contriving in themselves how long a 
month is, and how long these months will be. Well, 
it is a blessed thing for them to know the measures 
of time through their affections, — how much better 
than to learn its measures through expectations of 
pleasure, appetite, or any selfish good. If we all had 
our clock in our hearts, measuring off our days by 
the love we exercise to friends, to mankind and to 
God, we should make a friend of time also. We 
should live in fact a great while longer in a much 
shorter time. 

I have been greatly pleased, my dear daughter, 
by the spirit of your letters, because I think I see 
that you are earnestly desirous of improvement. I 
hope, meantime, that you will be turning your 



398 A GROUP OF LETTERS 

thouglits to religion and to God, as well as to your 
studies. You have been religiously educated, and 
you are come now to an age when you must begin 
to be more responsible to yourself. Our prayer for 
you is, every day, that God would impart his grace 
to you and draw you on to a full choice of himself, 
and perform the good work which we trust he has 
begun in you. This would complete our happiness 
in you. I would recommend to you now that you 
set before you, as a distinct object, the preparing 
yourself to make a profession of the Saviour. Make 
this a distinct object of thought and of prayer every 
day. And do not inquire so much what you are, 
whether truly a Christian in heart or not, as how you 
may come into the full Christian spirit, to become 
unselfish, to have a distinct and abiding love to 
Christ. Unite yourself to Christ for life, and try to 
receive his beautiful and loving spirit. You will 
find much darkness in you, but Christ will give you 
light. Your sins will trouble you, but Christ will 
take away your sins and give you peace. Pray God 
also to give you his Spirit, and do not doubt that his 
Spirit will help you through all difficulties. In all 
your duties and studies, endeavor to do them for God 
and so as to please him. Make this too your pleas- 
ure, for assuredly it will be the highest pleasure. It 
may not so appear at first, but it will be so very soon. 
IsTothing, you will see in a moment, can yield so 
sweet a pleasure as the love and pursuit of excel- 
lence, especially that excellence which consists in a 
good and right heart before God. And you will be 
more likely to love this work and have success in it. 



TO PRIEKDS 399 

if joa set before you some fixed object such as I 
have proposed. 

We gave you to God in your childhood, and now 
it belongs to you to thank God for the good we have 
sought to do for you, and try to fulfil our kindness 
by assuming for yourself what we promised for you. 
We feel very tenderly toward you, and we know that 
you love us; and Christ loves us all more than we 
can love each other. We are a very happy family, 
and if we are all one together in Christ, it will secure 
our happiness in all future time. 'No pleasure will 
be marred, and no blight will ever come upon the 
satisfaction we have in each other. May the good 
Spirit of God, my dear child, guide you in your ab- 
sence from us, be with you daily and assist you to 
be wise. May every day be a happy day, because 
it is passed under the smile of your heavenly Father. 
Your loving father, Horace Bushnell. 



To a lady who had broken her right arm, and who 
had ivritten to Dr. Bushnell in some mental distress 
ashing for guidance, 

Hartford, October 23, 1862. 
Dear Madam, — I was very glad to receive your 
kind left-hand note, and would like to give you a 
right-hand answer, that is, what they sometimes call 
the right hand of fellowship, or something like it. 
I have thought of you many times and often, not ex- 
actly with commiseration, God will save you from 
the need of that, but with tender sympathy for your 
hard lot. And yet, when you are able to say that 



400 A GROUP OF LETTERS 

" your Lord permits you to come near to Mm," I 
cannot think that anything has befallen you which 
you will not be able to bear, and that with a song. 

You imagine that God has a controversy with you 
because he afflicts you. Rather say or conclude 
that he has a friendship with you. Why should you 
be trying yourself with a torturing question whether 
you have not grieved the Holy Spirit, which I under- 
stand is the meaning of your inquiry. Hard work 
will you have to get any torment out of that dear 
text. The exhortation of it is not, do not anger, do 
not provoke, do not stir the resentments of the Holy 
Spirit; but it is, do not grieve, etc. It appeals to 
your delicacy, your justice, nay, to your friendly re- 
spect, and that upon the ground that you are like to 
make a wound and occasion the suffering of good- 
ness. And have you never observed this, that when 
a friend is grieved, he is just as certainly not shut up 
or averted from you ; just as truly a friend as before ? 
Suppose, then, that you have grieved the Holy Spir- 
it, and I am afraid you have a good many times, he 
is yet only grieved, and that will not harm you, 
though it ought to break your heart. 

Is not a friend who has been grieved by another, 
just as truly a friend, just as close in feeling, just as 
ready to bless, and only as much more tender as he 
is more afflicted? If he were angry, exasperated, it 
would not be so, but as certainly as he is grieved he 
is drawn, stands fast, loves, cherishes, waits to find 
the opportunity of friendship. 

Taking the exhortation thus, it will not hurt you 
I am sure, it will only break and dissolve all that is 



TO FRIENDS 401 

most intractable in yon and prepare yon to tlie dear 
revelation lie is always waiting to make. May God 
give yon always jnst this heavenly comfort of know- 
ing the heavenly Comforter — a Spirit that will not 
be more than grieved, never turned away by the poor 
human faults you discover. 

The patience of hope be with you. 

Truly yours, H. B. 

To a friend who was critically ill. 

Hartford, April 2, 1866. 
My Dear Mes. E., — I hear that you are in a 
suffering way and that a cloud is over your prospects 
of continuance. If so, I am sure that there will be 
no cloud over your heart and the longer, better pros- 
pects of your Christian expectation. It is a very 
great thing to leave this world, and yet I cannot think 
it a specially frightful thing. True, we make a 
plunge into the unknown, which is so far appalling, 
and yet even that is somewhat of a fiction. We do 
know a great deal about the matter after all. We 
know Christ, which is to know pretty much every- 
thing; we know what he is and can be to us, so that 
if we knew all about the city and the river and all the 
paradisaic figures it would not add much to our 
knowledge. It comes indeed to this, that our plunge 
into the unknown is plunging into a sea of knowledge 
— the same we have been sailing in before only in a 
coasting way. May God be with you and help you 
to be lifting your sail gladly. With much love, I am 
Yours in Christ, Horace Bushnell. 



APHORISMS 

[Some years ago a little collection of brief and pithy 
sayings from the published books of Dr. Bnshnell was 
made by his eldest daughter. The editor of these pa- 
pers has taken up the task of selection, with an attempt 
to make it more systematic and complete. In so doing 
the very wealth of material has proved an embarrass- 
ment, and the difficulty of choice greatly increased as 
new fields of research were invaded. For instance, in 
the sermons, it seemed a duty to choose not only those 
sentences which might best illustrate the condensed 
thought and faculty of terse expression of the author, 
but such as would urge home most faithfully his relig- 
ious lesson. And place must be found not only for the 
phrase of rugged vigor but for that which breathed ten- 
derness and love. In the theological books the march 
of the argument must be studied and illustrated. The 
simplest task was in making selections from the three 
books of Literary Varieties, which, treating of subjects 
more secular, have freedom for the boldest and most 
pregnant speech, rich in compact suggestion. Occa- 
sionally it has seemed well to admit a longer paragraph 
in which the thought was more expanded, simply as a 
rest to the mind of the reader. The best use of these 
aphorisms will be when one at a time is chosen and sep- 
arated from the rest as a subject of contemplation. 

403 



404 APHORISMS 

To a number of Tlie Congregationalist and Christian 
World, published June 7, 1902, and devoted especially 
to studies of Bushnell by several authors. Dr. T. T. 
Hunger contributed an interesting article on '^ The 
Aphorisms of Bushnell/^ the opening paragraphs of 
which furnish a fit introduction to this collection. He 
says: 

" If manners make the man, style reveals him. This 
is specially true of one whose whole life is devoted to 
writing. Whatever one does habitually comes at last 
to wear the imprint of his thought, and to measure the 
degree and intensity of it. In a man of so wide a range 
as Bushnell there will be a corresponding play of style. 
The prevailing note in his thought was undoubtedly a 
passion for God; and along with it was an equally domi- 
nant sense of nature, every form of which was ^ an anal- 
ogon of the spirit,^ or a door opening into God. 

" It was inevitable that there should be found in his 
writings a large amount of what is termed ^wisdom- 
literature ' — aphorisms, pithy phrases, that garner the 
wisdom of years and condense it into a sentence; or 
momentary glances at truth in rare moments, forever 
fixed by sentences that reflect them. Every writer of 
genius has something of this happy gift; the plodder 
goes on without it. A volume could be gleaned from 
BushnelFs writings that would fall into this category.^'] 



FROM WORK AND PLAY 405 



FROM ^^WORK AND PLA^ 

The best suggestives are the humblest instances. — 
Page 9. 

No creature lives that must not work and may not 
play.— p. 12. 

Work is activity for an end^, play activity as an end. 
—p. 13. 

To be good or true for the sake of some ulterior end 
is the same as to value goodness and truth second to 
that end, which is the same as to have no sense of 
either. — p. 13. 

Purity forced by self-restraint or maintained by mere 
prudence argues impurity. — p. 16. 

True purity, that which answers the perfect ideal, is 
spontaneous, unfolding its artless, unaffected spotless- 
ness in the natural freedom of a flower. It could not 
defile itself without an effort. — p. 16. 

All that is best and highest is freest^, and joyous be- 
cause it is free. — p. 17. 

What we call pleasure is commonly but another name 
for work, a strenuous joy, a laboriously prepared and 
therefore wearisome happiness. — p. 20. 

The true hero is the great wise man of duty. — p. 25. 

Genius is that which is good for play, talent that 
which is good for work. — p. 29. 

If geniuses are born, as we sometimes hear, they 
must yet be born again of study, struggle and work, 
—p. 29. 

Inspiration sought is inspiration hindered. — p. 29. 

N"o man makes a breeze for his vessel by blowing in 
the sail himself. — p. 30. 

All the giants of inspiration are sons of work. — p. 30. 



406 APHORISMS FROM 

Humor is the soul reeking with its own moisture, 
laughing because it is full of laughter, as ready to weep 
as to laugh. — p. 31. 

We shall iind that a certain capacity of elevation or 
poetic ardor is the most fruitful source of discovery, 
—p. 35. 

Religion is the only element of perfected freedom 
and greatness to a soul. — p. 39. 

Religion is the only sufficient fertilizer of genius, as 
it is the only real emancipator of man. — p. 41. 

Music and rhythm are the natural powers of order 
and crystallization in the social life of all moral natures. 
—p. 42. 

[National wealth] consists in the total value of the 
persons of the people. — p. 51. 

Wealth is but the shadow of men. — p. 54. 

In what form is wealth to be laid up, but in the per- 
sonal quality and value of the people ? — p. 56. 

Who shall respect a people who do not respect their 
own blood ? — p. 56. 

It was in keeping that Pan, who was the son of every- 
body, was the ugliest of the gods. — p. 63. 

It is in the open air, in communion with the sky, the 
earth and all living things, that the largest inspiration 
is drunk in and the vital energies of a real man con- 
structed. — p. 65. 

Genius is but an intellectual faith. — p. 67. 

Piety to God and piety to ancestors are the only 
forces which can impart an organic unity and vitality 
to a state. Torn from the past and from God, govern- 
ment is but a dead and brute machine. — p. 67. 

Law is uttered by the national life. — p. 68. 

A national literature consummates and crowns the 
greatness of a people. The best actions and the high- 
est personal virtues are scarcely possible till the inspir- 
ing force of a literature is felt. — p. 71. 



WORK AND PLAY 407 

The spirit of gain is not the spirit of song. — p. 72. 

Liberty is Justice secured. — p. 74. 

Be not afraid of a principle. He who has a principle 
is inspired. — p. 74. 

The worst impediment truth has ever had to complain 
of in our country has been in its spiritless and distrust- 
ful advocates. — p. 75. 

The story of Orpheus is now no more a fiction; for 
not only do the woods and rocks dance after this one 
singer, but all physical objects in heaven and earth, 
having now found an intellectual as well as a material 
power, follow after the creative agency of thinking 
souls and pour themselves along in trains of glory on 
the pages of literature. — p. 79. 

The general peace of nations and the nobler peace of 
virtue will make the reflective faculty as a clear-sound- 
ing bell in a calm day. — p. 119. 

The eye of Genius is not behind. Nor was there ever 
a truly great man whose ideal was in the past. — p. 119. 

Power moves in the direction of hope. — p. 119. 

Legions of men who dare not set their face the way 
that time is going are powerless; you may push them 
back with a straw. — p. 122. 

Suffer no effeminate disgusts, neither be repelled 
when a good object is maintained by crude and even 
pernicious arguments. — p. 122. 

Have faith in truth, never in numbers. — p. 122. 

A right opinion cannot die, for its life is in moral 
ideas, which is the life of God. — p. 123. 

In actual life there are two kinds of heroes — heroes 
for the visible and heroes for the invisible; they that 
see their mark hung out as a flag to be taken on some 
turret or battlement, and they that see it nowhere save 
in the grand ideal of the inward life. — p. 129. 

Their greatness is the unconscious greatness of their 
simple fidelity to God. — p. 133. 



408 APHORISMS FROM 

Whatever is wisest in thought and most heroic in im- 
pulse flows down npon men from the summits of relig- 
ion, and is in fact a divine birth in souls. — p. 138. 

Liberty is the compact impenetrable matter of much 
manhood, the compressed energy of good sense and pub- 
lic reason, having power to see before and after and 
measure action by counsel; this it is that walls about 
the strength and liberty of a people. — p. 151. 

To be free is not to % abroad as the owls of the 
night when they take the freedom of the air, but it is 
to settle and build and be strong. — p. 151. 

There was in Calvinism as a religion just that which 
would give abstractions the intensest power and the 
most awful reality to the mind. — p. 157. 

The mind was thrust into questions that compelled 
action — eternal decrees, absolute election, arbitrary 
grace, imputed sin, imputed righteousness. On these 
hard anvils of abstraction the blows of thought must 
needs be ever ringing. — p. 157. 

Hence the remarkable capacity for abstractions in 
the American mind. The Germans can live in them as 
their day dreams, but we can live upon them and by 
them as our daily bread. — p. 158. 

When God prepares a hammer it will not be made of 
silk.— p. 162. 

If our fathers were uncomfortable men, what great 
character ever lived that was not an uncomfortable man 
to his times ? — p. 162. 

The new order crystallizes only as the old is dis- 
solved. — p. 164. 

The way of greatness is the way of duty. — p. 166. 

Society is a vital creature, having roots of antiquity 
which inhere in the very soil, in the spots consecrated 
by valor, by genius and by religion. — p. 231. 

Slavery is a condition against nature. It produces a 
condition of ease which is not the reward of labor and a 
state of degradation which is not the curse of idleness. 
—p. 249. 



WORK AND PLAY 409 

Nothing but religion, a ligature binding society to 
God, can save it. — p. 261. 

There can be no other duty at all comparable to the 
duty of saving our country. — p. 263. 

It mattered not so much whether they thought exact- 
ly aright, as that they kept thinking, and in their think- 
ing brought down God upon their souls. — p. 263. 

The themes they handled kept them before God. 
They dwelt in the summits of divine government. — 
p. 264. 

We must shun that vapid liberalism which instead of 
attracting us into unity will only dissolve us into indif- 
ference. — p. 266. 

All the living creatures are fashioned by the life that 
is in them. — p. 272. 

Lives are immaterial, soul-like powers, organizing 
and conserving the bodies they inhabit. — p. 273. 

This boundless wave of Life that covers the world, we 
have little room to doubt, is in some high sense a wave 
of joy.— p. 273. 

A stately joy waves in the giant wood. The ebbing 
and flowing sea pants with the joys of life that are 
heaving in its depths. Even the sands of the old conti- 
nents tingle with the touch of joy. — p. 299. 

If some physicians were to only get hold of the true 
idea of life as a power, distinct from the laws of inor- 
ganic matter, they would be as much less likely to make 
inorganic matter of their patients. — p. 300. 

Is it then assumed that what we call the soul in man 
is really one and the same with his life principle? — 
p. 304. 

[The soul] is no ghostly affair which may or may 
not be, but it is the very power that organizes and 
conserves the body, real as the body, whose growths 
and palpitations even are operated by it. — p. 307. 

All the currents of [man's] life pour on after eternity 
as the rivers seek the sea. — ^p. 307. 



410 APHORISMS FROM 

Every human soul is conscious of its immortality, 
knows it by an immediate knowledge, takes the perma- 
nent by its own inborn affinities, never lets go of it or 
loses out the fixed evidence of conviction, till it has 
blurred itself by the sottishness or beguiled itself by 
the sophistries of sin. — p. 310. 

Loyalty is a volunteer devotion, else it is nothing. — 
p. 360. 

Men will faint anywhere and everywhere sooner than 
they will in what they do for their laws and liberties, 
—p. 362. 

The true, great heart of loyal men is rock to all waves 
of disaster. Possibilities left, discouragements are 
nothing. — ^p. 362. 

Loyalty is a sentiment close akin to honor. — p. 362. 

And this majestic honor of the mind to itself is the 
power that makes a hero. There is even a kind of im- 
passiveness in it. The soul is put in armor by it, as if 
the bosom were become a keep of iron. — p. 362. 

What is religion but loyalty to God? — p. 362. 

The summit of our nature is capped by its homages, 
and they rise in dignity according to the height of their 
objects. — p. 363. 

We make no idol of a poor rag in three colors, but 
we take it as the one all-sufficient symbol. — p. 366. 

Let no woman imagine that she is without conse- 
quence or motive to excellence, because she is not con- 
spicuous. — p. 404. 

!N"othing makes an inroad without making a road. 
All creative action, whether in government, industry, 
thought or religion, creates roads. — ^p. 410. 

The cathedral age was an age of roads and of travel, 
—p. 413. 

New kinds of good do appear in human history and 
there may be some yet to appear which have not been, 
—p. 413. 



WORK AND PLAY 411 

Travel and motion of every kind are signs of life, 
and life implies the quickening presence of new ideas, 
—p. 419. 

The subjugation of matter associates the subjugation 
of social and political evil. — p. 420. 

The roads of intercourse will create vital bonds of 
unity between nations, and a common circulation like 
that of the ducts of the body will make the members 
one as by a common life. — p. 441. 

We recognize the fact that God has made the sub- 
stances of the world to crystallize and grow under laws 
of music, so that strings and tubes of metal and wood, 
and voices opening in sound, shall speak in a panhar- 
monic language for whatever feeling struggles in the 
depths of the human bosom. — p. 460. 

This divine principle of music breaks into the style 
of every good writer, every powerful speaker, and beats 
in rhythmic life in his periods. — p. 460. 

The talent of music is the possibility in fact of 
rhythm, of inspiration and of all poetic life. — p. 464. 



FROM " MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS " 

This whole frame of being is bedded in Mind. — 
Page 7. 

As one day of the year is certain to be Christmas, 
there ought to be some day in such a calendar of days 
when Christ is born to the soul, a sublime Anno Domini 
at which all after-dates begin. — p. 17. 

The faith of immortality depends on a sense of it 
begotten, not on an argument for it concluded. — p. 19. 

Sleep is a spiritualizer in the constitution of nature 
itself.— p. 22. 

As tenants of a star-world, we are not the same be- 
ings we should be in a world of mere sunlight. — p. 23. 

The night is the judgment bar of the day. — p. 25. 



412 APHORISMS FROM MORAL USES 

It is a great part of God's purpose in sleep to renew 
abused powers. — p. 28. 

Everything morale even up to the joy of moral per- 
fection, is and is meant to be creative. True moral joy 
is not infused into souls but comes up out of hidden 
wells in their own positive goodness. Their beatific 
state is nothing but the consummation of a creative 
force working in the springs of their character. It is 
a state of power and its joy is the birth of power. — p. 37. 

Man does not sufficiently exist if he is not made to 
fight for his existence. If he is not made creative then 
he is but half created. — p. 38. 

What living man that has the least capacity of reflec- 
tion has not discovered that good necessities are the 
grandest wealth of existence ? — p. 41. 

If there were a home everywhere, then there were no 
home. — p. 43. 

It is the sin of all sin that it refuses limitation, will 
not accept the limitations even of law. — p. 45. 

Use or utility is not any certain law of morality or 
religious conduct. — p. 50. 

God does not govern the world by force. He has 
consented to govern it through its liberty. — p. 56. 

It requires less nerve to fight a battle than to resist 
a fashion. — p. 58. 

Evil is scarcely to be known as evil, till it takes the 
condition of authority. — p. 64. 

If I could simply see the back of Cato jogging out 
a-field, or hear one sentence spoken by Caesar's voice, it 
really seems to me I should get a better knowledge of 
either from that single token than I have gotten yet 
from all other sources. So very impotent are words to 
reproduce or keep in impression the facts and men of 
history. — p. 75. 

About everything valuable in a good and great past 



OF DARK THINGS 413 

is garnered in oblivion, not to be lost but to be kept 
and made fruitful. — p. 77. 

What greater injury in general can befall a character 
than to have its story made up in such nice precision as 
exactly to meet the little curiosities of little minds ?— • 
p. 82. 

A full-written circumstantial biography would be a 
mortal suffocation. There is no way but to let obliv- 
ion compose a good part of the story. — p. 84. 

Nothing is so little known as that which is lugged 
into knowledge. — p. 85. 

Above all let there be no timid and heartless emula- 
tion of past things, taking refuge under them from the 
bold responsibilities of the present. Let the passing 
pass, and the great moral ideas keep their ferment a- 
going and new life freshening in the world. — p. 90. 

God^s rectoral goodness works by damage. — p. 107. 

It appears to have been necessary for the best effect 
of pain that it should be a liability of the whole mun- 
dane system, and be in that manner a kind of general 
sacrament for the world. — p. 109. 

To bear and dare, these two great lessons are among 
the chief moral uses of life. — p. 114. 

To wade through months of pain, to spin out years of 
weariness and storm, can be done triumphantly only by 
such as can resolutely welcome the discipline their nat- 
ure wants. — p. 114. 

But in the long-drawn months or years of inevitable 
pain, where there is no castle without to be carried as 
by storm, but only a dull blind nature to be fertilized 
within, — there to hold a placid mind and to keep firm 
grapple with the agony is to be equal to a great occasion 
as few men ever can be. — p. 117. 

In the moral life there is no government but self- 
government, no conservation but self-conservation. — 
p. 124. 



414 APHORISMS FROM MORAL USES 

Just as dangers fill the world, so all men and women 
too are called to act in some heroic part, and the plan 
of life itself is to make heroes, according to the nerve 
and resolute faith by which the fight of lifers trial is 
maintained. — p. 137. 

Wrong is the very matrix in which thousands of hap- 
less children are formed. — p. 137. 

There is a foolish and presumptuous side in our hu- 
man nature that makes too great familiarity dangerous. 
Not even Jehovah would be God to his people if he al- 
lowed them to see more than just the back of his retir- 
ing form. — p. 177. 

Real conviction goes before talk and is grounded in 
the souFs own thinking of subjects and questions them- 
selves. — p. 180. 

Real faith is not something talked into us, but a most 
inward perception of that which is inwardly revealed, 
—p. 180. 

To be still with God and only hear him whisper, sig- 
nifies a great deal more than could intercourse with de- 
parted souls. Such kind of knowledge is not talked 
into the soul but thought into it. There is no clatter 
in it, drowning the sense, but it is born from within out 
of God^s deep silence. — p. 182. 

What is the consciousness of God but an implied con- 
sciousness of immortality? — p. 186. 

It is the nature of every mind set open by good to 
have the commerce and felt presence of all the good. 
They will not come to the senses or speak with us by 
their voices, but there will be a sense of their company 
unseen, and their friendly help. — p. 186. 

The parable of the prodigal son is a winter parable 
in its date. He came also to himself and began to be 
in want, because it was a time of short allowance. — 
p. 196. 

How many tropically nurtured martyrs have we ever 
heard of ? And we need not quit our zone to learn the 
reason. — p. 198. 



OP BARK THINGS 415 

Everything is hung on providence, and the man who 
will not provide cannot live. — p. 200. 

Home is a northern word, not found in the languages 
of the tropical nations. — p. 201. 

A whole half-year spent at the hearth, mornings 
there begun with prayer, long evenings enlivened by 
mutual society and common studies, books opening their 
treasures, games their diversions, this it is that con- 
denses a home. — p. 201. 

After all, the best favors of God are those which take 
on shapes of rigor and necessity and prepare the strong- 
est hunger in us for the good of a world invisible. — 
p. 205. 

The winter of the body is the summer of the mind, 
—p. 207. 

All evil is connected with its fit tokens of expression. 
The races all march down their way carrying their own 
dishonored flags. — p. 221. 

Sin will get fit discipline here only as it occupies the 
house it builds. — p. 221. 

There is all the beauty here there can be, and all 
there ought to be, unless there can be more of worth 
and less of wrong. — p. 222. 

There is more great living and grandly toned benefi- 
cence killed by contemptible delicacy than there is by 
the rough, hard fights of war. — p. 227. 

All the moral uses of life therefore come to their 
point in this, in learning how to let go captivating 
things for such as are solid, in making sacrifices of 
things innocent for things beneficent, in ceasing to 
please ourselves that we may work out the fruit of our 
principles. — p. 230. 

This terrible brotherhood, this oneness of organic 
order and fate, signified by the word humanity, — what 
an appeal does it make to us for the gospelling of these 
barbarous and decayed nations. — p. 230. 



416 APHORISMS FROM MORAL USES 

Each plague and giant death that stalks across the 
world is really sent forth as a tremendous call for mercy 
and light, wanted in some dark realm far away. — p. 244. 

We live in the real brotherhood of all corruption, and 
no pitch of rank or wall of caste can separate us from 
its woes; When it takes a pestilence and has nursed it 
into power, it is for us. — ^p. 245. 

Christianity has antiseptic properties which prove 
both its origin and its value. — p. 247. 

Idleness unyokes all the judgments, lets fly all the 
vagrant, uncollected powers, and finally as age advances 
breeds a state of nonentity that cannot hold opinions, 
or a harebrained, addled state that opinions cannot 
hold.— p. 254. 

Probably a thousand years are wanted still to get the 
world apprised of the fact that breathing requires some- 
thing to breathe. — p. 254. 

The wrongs men do against themselves start no out- 
cry; the wrongdoer is the victim and the victim calls 
for no arraignment or redress. — p. 257. 

If we are to keep our reason, our reason must keep 
Tis.— p. 259. 

Instead of possessing their business, their business 
possesses them, shoving them on to all utmost overdo- 
ing, and finally to madness. — p. 260. 

Anything is a possession that dispossesses the man of 
himself, from whatever world it comes. — p. 261. 

Every human creature is in the way to insanity who 
allows himself to be possessed by any kind of impulsion 
outside of his own responsible self-keeping. — p. 263. 

Public education is no handmaid of order and law, 
unless order and law are the handmaid of education, 
—p. 265. 

Moral weakness and distemper can be supplemented 
only by moral strength and the all-tempering sway of 
duty.— p. 265. 



OF DARK THINGS 417 

Majorities are no reliable cure of public ills, unless 
the public ills are somehow gotten out of the major- 
ities.— p. 271. 

Elemental forces, grinding hard about us and upon 
us, are necessary to the due unfolding of our moral and 
religious ideas. — p. 282. 

We want irritants to stir us up and nettle us into vi- 
vacity, as truly as we do the lull of music and the breeze 
to quiet us. — p. 283. 

This element of mischief for the sake of mischief en- 
ters largely into human conduct. We have not made 
up the full inventory of evil when we have simply 
shown what selfishness will do for selfish ends. Evil 
has a demonizing power not working always by calcula- 
tion.— p. 290. 

Even passing out of a good and losing it is better 
than to be a petrifaction in it, or to have it petrified 
about us. — p. 324. 

We are put to sea in the mutable that we may reach 
the immutable, which is only a true version of the im- 
mortal. — p. 326. 

These mutabilities give us the idea, and so the ac- 
cepted and established fact, of immortality. — p. 326. 

The real first question is not immortality, but immu- 
tability; for the sense of our everduringness comes 
through no speculation about the matter of dateless 
continuance, but through what germinations we have 
in us and what experiences we get of the immutable. 
—p. 327. 

In these prodigious throes of endeavor that keep the 
world astir we are scorning the mutabilities and press- 
ing toward the changeless. — p. 327. 

Evil excluded and gone, immutability is everywhere, 
—p. 332. 

Immortality is nothing but the fact translated of im- 
mutable morality. — p. 332. 

We are so bound up with eternal ideas and with God 
that we have the fact of immortality by moral im- 
pression. — p. 334. 



418 APHORISMS FROM MORAL USES 

There are some who will never get away from things 
far enough to embrace principles, till some final sweep 
of calamity strips all things away; never come unto 
God, till by some great storm they are virtually wrecked 
on him. — p. 340. 

There are islands in the southern oceans larger than 
England that are yet to become seats of power and of 
empire, giving to all the northern climes both of. the 
eastern and western worlds the experiment of new prin- 
ciples needful to their progress and happiness. [A 
prophecy.] — p. 350. 

It is this fluid sea, on whose bosom the free winds of 
heaven are wafting the world^s commerce, which repre- 
sents all mobility and progress in the human state. — 
p. 352. 

We observe that the prejudices of men who live upon 
and by the waters are never invincible. They admit of 
change somewhat by habit and association, as their ele- 
ment changes and they shift their sail to the winds, 
—p. 352. 

The spirit of commerce is the spirit of peace, its in- 
terest the interest of peace, and peace is the element of 
all moral progress, as war is the element of all barba- 
rism and desolation. — p. 353. 

The man of commerce is never a bigot. — p. 354. 

Commerce is itself catholic. — p. 354. 

The sails of commerce are the wings of truth. — 
p. 355. 

Such is the narrowness of man that even the love of 
Christ itself is in perpetual danger of dwindling to a 
bigot prejudice in the soul. — p. 356. 

We anticipate a day for man when commerce itself 
shall become religious and religion commercial, when 
the holy and the useful shall be blended in a common 
life of brotherhood and duty, comprising all the human 
kindred of the globe. — p. 357. 



FROM BUILDING ERAS 419 



FROM "BUILDING ERAS'' 

Everything indicates that these present times are 
God^s beginnings, and we almost see with our eyes that 
the world is but an egg unhatched as yet, preparation, 
possibility, nothing more. — Page 19. 

If Holiness to the Lord is to be written on the bells 
of the horses, why not on these wires which are so much 
closer to intelligence ? — p. 20. 

There is a beautifully artless art in sanctified souls. 
—p. 21. 

Faith henceforth will not be timorous any more, for 
it is now become the congener of all reason. — p. 29. 

The world itself is now become God's Classic, a book 
that is perfect in the method, grand in the subject and 
full of all deepest insight. — p. 38. 

Whatever nations get most forward practically in 
science must bring all others under. — p. 47. 

No full round man can be educated in particular to 
this or that, and full round men we do amazingly want 
in all the walks of life. — p. 50. 

We can never tell what a soul is going to break into, 
when it is once started into action. It may even break 
into theology, asking leave of nobody. — p. 51. 

Short work is commonly sharp work and long work 
is commonly dull. — p. 54. 

He [the academic student] is educated partly out of 
his wits by being educated into them. — p. 54. 

What is matter for but to be used in ways of advan- 
tage ? Do we not live in it ? Are we not fastened to it 
as we are to our bodies, nay to our heads and faces? 
And what has poor pious agriculture been looking to 
and digging in from the first day till now ? — p. 60. 

There is no schooling for the imagination at all com- 
parable to science as regards richness and stimulating 
ef&cacy, save in religion itself. — p. 63, 



420 APHORISMS FROM 

There is no hymn for all the gods that has the music 
of this. [Chemistry.] — p. 63. 

If there is no truth in religion, it must die of course, 
and may as well die soon. If there is truth in it, there 
is most assuredly no other truth in conflict with it. — 
p. 63. 

Science is but intelligence discovering intelligence, 
mind rethinking the thoughts of mind everywhere pres- 
ent. — p. 64. 

[Ambitious and hasty scientists] in their zeal for 
precedence quite forestall the honors it brings, setting 
up their flag on islands a little before they are discov- 
ered. — p. 66. 

Conjectures, unripe guesses, cannot turn a mill or 
color a flower or kindle auroral fires about the point of 
a magnet. Hydraulics for the imagination will not an- 
swer for water. — p. 67. 

Hitherto we have had small men living in small char- 
acter, partl}^ because they have had no grand dominion 
of property in the world such as belongs to them, 
—p. 67. 

Scientific order by a hidden law of sympathy favors 
all virtue; character, in fact, is only order in mind. 
Order in mind will link itself with a perpetual assent to 
law.— p. 69. 

'No child can be said to be well trained who has not 
met the people, as they are above him or below, in the 
seatings, plays and studies of the common school. — 
p. 81. 

Common schools are nurseries of a free republic, pri- 
vate schools of factions, cabals, agrarian laws and con- 
tests of force. — p. 82. 

Nature is a realm so adjusted that whenever any 
moral agent or race of agents casts ofl: the law moral, 
a train of natural consequences forthwith takes them 
in hand for discipline or retribution. — p. 127. 



BUILDING ERAS 421 

[The doctrine of the Trinity] is nothing bnt the doc- 
trine that God is a being practically related to his creat- 
ures. — p. 136. 

God is not entombed in his works. — p. 155. 

Forms are his pliant investiture. — p. 155. 

Laws are the currents of his will flowing toward the 
ends of his reason. — p. 155. 

The breast of universal nature glows with his 
warmth. It enlivens even the grave, and the be- 
liever's flesh, feeling the Lord of the resurrection by, 
resteth in hope. — p. 156. 

Like some breath of wind which has passed through 
fragrant trees and banks of flowers, searching them and 
bringing grateful flavors of them, so the all-present 
Spirit ever wafts upon us tlie deep things, the hidden 
fragrance and the treasured sweetness, of the divine 
nature. — p. 158. 

He is no less the author of variety that he produces 
variety by system. — p. 160. 

The Christian warfare is not all battle. There are 
times in it for polishing the armor, forming the tactics, 
and feeding the vigor of the host. — p. 170. 

The extraordinary got up in action, as in rhetoric, is 
impotence itself. — p. 174. 

The great business of the gospel is to form men to 
God.— p. 175. 

The tendrils of the vines are small things, but yet 
they support the grapes. — p. 179. 

Be thou then a temple indeed, a sacred place to him. 
Let all thy thoughts within, like white-robed priests, 
move round the altar and keep the fire burning. — Let 
thine affections be always a cloud, filling the room and 
inwrapping thy priest-like thoughts. Let thy hallowed 
desires be ever fanning the mercy-seat with their 
wings. — p. 181. 



422 APHORISMS FROM 

Books are not everything by a great deal. It is even 
one of the sad things about book-learning that it so 
easily becomes a limitation upon souls and a kind of 
dry-rot in their vigor. The receptive faculty absorbs 
the generative and the scholarhood sucks up the man- 
hood.*— p. 187. 

Of what use is it to know the German when we do 
not know the human ? Or to know the Hebrew points 
when we do not know the points of our wonderfully 
punctuated humanity? — p. 187. 

Preaching is nothing but the bursting out of light, 
which has first burst in or up from where Grod is, among 
the souFs foundations. — p. 188. 

Death itself is a great analyzer and nothing ever 
comes out of the analyzing process fully alive. — p. 188. 

Formulas are the jerked meat of salvation; if not al- 
ways the strong meat, as many try to think, yet dry and 
portable and good to keep, and when duly seethed and 
softened and served with needful condiments just possi- 
ble to be eaten; but for the matter of living we really 
want something fresher and more nutritious. — p. 189. 

A great many preachers die of style, that is of try- 
ing to soar, when if they would only consent to go afoot 
as their ideas do, they might succeed and live. — p. 189. 

To get up grand expressions in the manner of some, 
and then go a-hunting after only weak ideas to put into 
them, is the very absurdest and wickedest violation pos- 
sible of the second commandment. — p. 190. 

"No man has a right to say any beautiful or powerful 
thing till he gets some thoughts beautiful and power- 
ful enough to require it. Only good and great matter 
makes a good and great style. — p. 190. 

It is not difficult for power to be strong or for any 
real fire to burn. But mere rhetorical fire will neither 
shake nor burn anything. — p. 190. 

* The selections from pages 187 to 218 are from an address on 
*' Pulpit Talent," which is so full of terse and compact speech that 
choice is difficult. 



BUILDING ERAS 423 

Simple modesty, earnest conviction — what a lifting 
of the doom of impotence wonld they be to many! — 
p. 191. 

Some men never grow. They grew and that was the 
end of it.— p. 193. 

Faith has a way of proving premises themselves, 
namely by seeing them. — p. 203. 

Conceit is the bane of faith, and where there is no 
faith the possibility of power is barred. — p. 318. 

Eemember as a law of the talents that any one of 
them waked into power wakes the talent next to it. — 
p. 218. 

The dead magnet clinging to nobody will have no- 
body clinging to it. — p. 222. 

Any due interest in men supposes a living observa- 
tion of men. — p. 222. 

There are thousands of men who are really halved in 
capacity all their life long because they omit to see. 
—p. 230. 

And it must be no beholding of surfaces, but there 
must be a looking far in, where the eternities are. — 
p. 230. 

Here in the souFs secret chambers are Fausts 
more subtle than Faust, Hamlets more mysterious than 
Hamlet, Lears more distracted and desolate than Lear; 
wills that do what they allow not, and what they would 
not, do; wars in the members; bodies of death to be 
carried, as in Paul; wild horses of the mind governed 
by no rein, as in Plato ; subtleties of cunning, plausibili- 
ties of seeming virtues, memories writ in letters of fire, 
great thoughts heaving under the brimstone marl of re- 
venges, pains of wrong and of sympathy with suffering 
wrong, aspirations that have lost courage, hates, loves, 
beautiful dreams and tears; all these acting at cross- 
purposes and representing as it were to sight the 
broken order of the mind. Getting into the secret 
working, and seeing how the drama goes on in so many 
mystic parts, the wondrous life-scene, — shall we call it 



424: APHORISMS FROM 

poetry? — takes on a look at once brilliant and pitiful 
and appalling, and what we call the person becomes a 
world of boundless capacities shaken out of their law, 
energies in full conflict and without government, pas- 
sions that are wild, sorrows that are weak. By such ex- 
plorations, never to be exhausted by discovery, our 
sense of person or mind or soul is widely opened and 
may always be kept fresh; a most necessary qualifica- 
tion for any right seeking of men, such as may obtain 
a living connection with them in the matter of their im- 
mortal welfare. It will not so be subjects only that en- 
gage us, but persons ; for persons will have the freshest 
meaning, and be thought of as the deepest and most 
fascinating kind of study. — pp. 233-234. 

If we are to get the highest possible, only true inter- 
est in our fellow-men, we must go up into God to find 
it.— p. 236. 

Large natural sympathies are good, but large super- 
natural are better. — p. 245. 

We are to be always going apart that we may come 
nigh, to be getting our Promethean fire from above and 
our clay from below, to send our prayers up after 
strength for our burdens, and find below the burdens to 
be carried, to keep in God^s high sympathy and bring 
that sympathy down close to men. — p. 247. 

The spiritual comes out of the physical, and the more 
spiritual out of the less, just because one thing is ready 
for the expression of another and still another. — p. 256. 

Metaphor on metaphor crowds the earth and the 
skies, bearing each a face that envisages the Eternal 
Mind, whose word or wording forth it is to be. — p. 259. 

Human language is a gift to the imagination so es- 
sentially metaphoric, warp and woof, that it has no 
exact blocks of meaning to build a science of. — p. 272. 

Nothing makes infidels more surely than the spin- 
ning, splitting, nerveless refinements of theology. — 
p. 274. 



BUILDING ERAS 425 

(Baptism.) Nothing is more clear on the face of the 
rite than that it has its whole significance as a meta- 
phor, even as the Supper is a metaphor of hospitality. 

—p. 278. 

A sprinkle of clean water makes clean, a washing of 
the feet makes clean every whit. — p. 279. 

(The Apostle's Creed.) If there is any realm of cen- 
tral astronomic order, it has been this fad-form, truly 
Copernican confession, about which all the orbits of all 
the saints have in all ages been revolving. — p. 284. 

Enforcements create fear but never obligation. True 
obligation towers above all enforcements. — p. 289. 

What is conscience, but that summit of our nature 
where it touches God? — p. 290. 

All true authority in law is of a moral nature and 
stands in allegiance to God. — p. 316. 

It is the ammunition spent that gains the battle, not 
the ammunition brought off from the field. These dead 
are the spent ammunition of our war, and theirs above 
all is the victory. — p. 322. 

All great heroic men have seeds and roots far back, 
it may be, out of which they spring and apart from 
which they could not spring at all; a sublime father- 
hood and motherhood in whose blood and life, however 
undistinguished, victory was long ago distilling for the 
great day to come of their people and nation. — p. 323. 

The chief thing was the making of the souls them- 
selves, and when that was done the successes came of 
course. — p. 324. 

Common life, the world's great life, is in the large 
way tragic. — p. 325. 

Without shedding of blood there is almost nothing 
great in the world, or to be expected for it. — p. 326. 

No argument transmutes a discord, or composes a 
unity where there was none. — p. 330. 

No people ever become vigorously conscious till they 
mightily do and heroically suffer. — p. 331. 



426 APHORISMS FROM BUILDING ERAS 

Nations can sufficiently live, only as they find how 
to heroically die. — p. 332. 

We have gotten the pitch of a grand new Abrahamic 
statesmanship, unsophisticated, honest and real. — 
p. 337. 

Great action is the highest kind of writing, and he 
that makes a noble character writes the finest kind of 
book.— p. 339. 

To invent is one thing, to become is another and 
vastly higher. — p. 339. 

I am not sure that some specially heroic natures do 
not flag and go down under evil, just because the storm 
they were made for has not begun to blow. — p. 343. 

Without any particle of vain assumption, we swear 
by our dead to be Americans. — p. 355. 

Charity will cover a multitude of sins — not all. The 
dearest and truest charity will uncover many. — p. 405. 

considering it to be the highest reason to believe, 

and the highest faith to reason. — p. 408. 

The new must be the birth of the old and the old 
must have its births or die. The future must be of the 
past and the past must create a future. — p. 421. 

There is a philosophic necessity that the comprehen- 
sive church of the future, if ever it shall appear, should 
conform to the constructive law of our institutions. — 
p. 430. 

We can never have a comprehensive church in this 
nation that mocks the political order of the nation. — 
p. 435. 

Truth is a whole, and is to be sought only as a whole, 
anywhere, everywhere, and by all means. — p. 446. 

We must habitually suspect ourselves of limitatioiLt 
—p. 451. 



FROM GOD m CHRIST 427 



FROM " GOD IN CHRIST " 

For the body is a living logos, added to the soul to be 
its form and play it forth into social understanding. 
—Page 23. 

There is no book in the world that contains so many 
repugnances or antagonistic forms of assertion as the 
Bible.— p. 69. 

Never was there a book uniting so many contrarious 
aspects of one and the same truth. The more com- 
plete therefore because of its manifoldness, nay the 
more really harmonious for its apparent want of har- 
mony. — p. 70. 

The ^^ winged words " of the Bible are required [by 
the dogmatists] to serve as beasts of burden or, what 
is no better, to forget their poetic life as messengers of 
the air and stand still, fixed upon the ground as wooden 
statues of truths. — p. 72. 

Poets are the true metaphysicians, and if there be 
any complete science of man to come they must bring 
it.— p. 73. 

What is the Christian truth? Pre-eminently and 
principally it is the expression of God, God coming into 
expression through histories and rites, through an in- 
carnation and through language, in one syllable by the 
Word.— p. 74. 

There is however one hope for mental and religious 
truth and their final settlement, which I confess I see 
but dimly and can but faintly express or indicate. It 
is that physical science leading the way, setting out- 
ward things in their true proportions, opening up their 
true contents, revealing their genesis and final causes 
and laws, and weaving all into the unity of a real uni- 
verse, will so perfect our knowledges and conceptions 
of them that we can use them in the second depart- 
ment of language with more exactness. 



428 APHORISMS FROM 

For "undoubtedly, the whole universe of nature is a 
perfect analogon of the whole universe of thought or 
spirit. Therefore as nature becomes truly a universe 
only through science revealing its universal laws, the 
true universe of thought and spirit cannot sooner be 
conceived. It would be easy to show in this connec- 
tion the immense force already exerted over the empire 
of spiritual truth by astronomy, chemistry, geology, 
the revelations of light and electricity, and especially 
of the mysterious and plastic workings of life in the 
animal and vegetable kingdoms. We are accustomed 
to say that this is not the same world to live in that 
it was fifty years ago. Just as true is it that it is not 
the same world to think in that it then was. — p. 78. 

Every language carries in its bosom some flavor of 
meaning or import derived from all the past genera- 
tions that have lived in it. — p. 84. 

The roots of the known are always in the unknown. 

—p. 87. 

Infinitesimals, though there be many of them, are 
not the best judges of infinites. — p. 91. 

Man is designed in his very nature to be a partially 
mystic being, the world to be looked upon as a mystic 
world. Christ himself revealed a decidedly mystic ele- 
ment in his teachings. — p. 94. 

God exceeds our measure and must, until either he 
becomes less than infinite or we more than finite. — 
p. 122. 

It is a dull patient that expects always to be cured 
by the same medicine. — p. 295. 

God never restores an old thing or an old state. If 
he produces something that has resemblance to an old 
state, it will yet be different. — p. 295. 

The gospel is in one view a magnificent work of 
art, a manifestation of God which is to find the world 
and move it and change it through the medium of ex- 
pression. — p. 302. 



GOD IN CHRIST 429 

Spiritual truth dies with spiritual life. It is vital, 
it is essential life in its own nature, and therefore must 
be kept alive, as it began to live, by an inward and im- 
mediate connection with God. — p. 305. 

We cannot by any mere phosphorescence of thought 
throw out from within ourselves that daylight which 
our soul desires, and which in the manifested radiance 
of God it may ever have. — p. 307. 

It will be found after all that the soul of a child 
will not be fastened to Christ by spikes of dogma, driv- 
en by parental authority. The truest power of disci- 
pline is that which is most divine, the fragrance of a di- 
vine life filling the house. — p. 311. 

Curiosity abates when faith enters, and the instinct 
of system lulls in its activity as spiritual life quickens 
in the soul. — p. 311. 

Science without will favor simplicity and rest within, 
—p. 312. 

We have still immense masses of theologic rubbish on 
hand which belong to the Ptolemaic system, huge piles 
of assumption about angels that have never sinned, and 
angels that have, about other worlds and the reach of 
Christ's atonement there, which were raised up evident- 
ly on the world when it was flat and must ultimately 
disappear as we come into a more true sense of the as- 
tronomic universe. — p. 314. 

The intellectual life needs to be kept in high action, 
else under pretence of living in the Spirit we are soon 
found living in our fancies and our passions. — p. 315. 

Eegarding the realm of reason and the realm of faith 
as our two Houses of Assembly, we are to consider noth- 
ing as enacted into a law which has not been able to 
pass both houses. — p. 316. 

As the activity of faith and spirit declines, the activ- 
ity of the flesh and of dogma increases. — p. 319. 

We no more look upon it as Christian to make opin- 
ions draw blood, but we hold them still as rules of judg- 
ment and terms of fellowship in a sense almost as abso- 
lute as ever. — p. 320. 



430 APHORISMS FROM SERMONS 

The difficulty is to find out error; that in fact is the 
war, for when error is once revealed and known it dies 
itself.— p. 322. 

Truth is omnipotence, a slow omnipotence I grant, 
but yet omnipotence. — p. 324. 

We should not preach a catechism but a gospel. — 
p. 336. 



FROM "SERMONS FOR THE NEW LIFE'' 

Ends and uses are the regulative reasons of all ex- 
isting things. These uses are to God, no doubt, as to 
us, the significance of his works. — Page 12. 

If there were any smallest star in heaven that had no 
place to fill, that oversight would beget a disturbance 
which no Leverrier could compute ; because it would be 
a real and eternal, and not merely casual or apparent 
disorder. — p. 13. 

Every human soul has a complete and perfect plan 
cherished for it in the heart of Ood, a divine biography 
marked out, which it enters life to live. — p. 14. 

We live in the Divine thought. We fill a place in the 
great everlasting plan of God's intelligence. — p. 14. 

Your life is a school, exactly adapted to your lesson, 
—p. 16. 

The tallest saints of God will often be those who walk 
in the deepest obscurity. — p. 16. 

No man is ever called to be another. God has as 
many plans for men as he has men; and, therefore, he 
never requires them to measure their life exactly by any 
other life. — p. 19. 

To be a copyist, working at the reproduction of a hu- 
man model, is to have no faith in one's significance, to 
judge that God means nothing in his particular life, but 
only in the life of some other man. — p. 19. 

What you call hindrances, obstacles, discourage- 
ments, are probably God's opportunities. — ^p. 20. 



FOR THE NEW LIFE 431 

Be an observer of Providence; for God is showing 
you ever, by the way in which he leads you, whither he 
means to lead. — p. 23. 

Understand, also, that the great question here is, not 
what you will get, but what you will become. The 
greatest wealth you can ever get will be in yourself. — 
p. 28. 

All that we mean by the heavenly joy and perfection 
is nothing but the restoration and the everlasting bloom 
of that high capacity for God in which our normal state 
began, and of which that first state was only the germ 
or prophecy. Man finds his paradise, when he is impar- 
adised in God. — p. 41. 

No man has any satisfaction in himself, simply as a 
person acting from his own centre. He dwindles pain- 
fully in this manner, and becomes a mere dry point, 
position without magnitude. — p. 43. 

There is a vast, immortal want stirring on the world 
and forbidding it to rest. — p. 63. 

As little could he apprehend the tragic sublimity of 
Hamlet, considered only as an amiable son ingenuously 
hurt by the insult done his father's name and honor. 
The character is great, not here, but in its wildness and 
its tragic mystery; delicate and fierce, vindictive and 
cool, shrewd and terrible, a reasonable and a reasoning 
madness, more than we can solve, all that we can feel, 
—p. 64. 

No man will ever have any difficulty in believing the 
work of Christ who has not lost the measures of hu- 
manity. — p. 66. 

The shadow by which most convincingly your true 
height is measured, is that which is cast athwart the 
abyss of your shame and spiritual ignominy. — p. 68. 

With your farthing bribes you try to hush your stu- 
pendous wants, with your single drops, (drops of gall 
and not of water,) to fill the ocean of your immortal 
aspirations. — p. 69. 



432 APHORISMS FROM SERMONS 

A life separated from God is a life of bitter hunger, 
or even of spiritual starvation. — p. 72. 

The soul is a creature that wants food in order to its 
satisfaction, as truly as the body. — p. 73. 

It is the unsatisfied, hungry mind that flies to the 
body for some stimulus of sensation, compelling it to 
devour so many more of the husks as will feed the hun- 
gry prodigal within. — p. 78. 

Three-quarters of the ill nature of the world is caused 
by the fact that the soul, without God, is empty and 
so out of rest. — p. 83. 

The change of the governing purpose is the regenera- 
tion of the man. — p. 117. 

Every man^s life is shaped by his love. — ^p. 118. 

A tree can as well live out of the light or out of the 
air, as a finite soul out of God and separate from God. 
—p. 120. 

A man can as little drag himself up into a new reign- 
ing love, as he can drag a Judas into paradise. — p. 123. 

If the faith is to be God's work, it is also to be your 
act, and it cannot be worked before it is acted. — p. 125. 

The result of this incarnate history is that we are 
drawn to a different opinion of God; we have seen that 
he can love as a man loves another, and that such is the 
way of his love. He has tasted death we say, not for 
all men only but for every man. — p. 130. 

No disciple is a real disciple till he becomes a follow- 
er.— p. 134. 

See that Christ is not behind you but before, calling 
and drawing you on. — p. 137. 

Let us understand ourselves in this; that we are not 
what we talk or stand for with our words, but what we 
do and become. — ^p. 139. 

God is not a mere thought of our own brain, but a be- 
ing in the world of substance, fact and event, and all 
such knowledge has to be gotten slowly, through the 
rub of experience. — ^p. 145. 



FOR THE NEW LIFE 433 

As the sun cannot show distinctly what it is in the 
bottom of a muddy pool, so God can never be distinctly 
revealed in the depths of a foul and earthly mind. — 
p. 146. 

Knowing nothing of God, he is no mystery at all; 
knowing a little, he is mystery begun; knowing more, 
he is a great and manifold deep, not to be fathomed, 
—p. 149. 

He gives us a dim light and sets us prying at the walls 
of mystery, that he may create an appetite and relish in 
us for true knowledge. — p. 158. 

Ignorance trying to comprehend what is inscrutable, 
and out of patience that it cannot make the high things 
of God come down to its own petty measures, is the def- 
inition of all atheism. — p. 161. 

Knowledge puffeth up, charity buildeth up. One 
makes a balloon of us, the other a temple. — p. 161. 

To know is not to surmount God, as some would ap- 
pear to imagine. — -p. 163. 

Eightly viewed, all real knowledge is but the knowl- 
edge of God.— p. 163. 

Knowledge is the fire of adoration, adoration is the 
gate of knowledge. — p. 163. 

The resurrection morning is a true sun-rising, the in- 
bursting of a cloudless day on all the righteous dead, 
—p. 164. 

Low grades of being want low objects, but the want 
of man is God. — p. 167. 

This is the fearful, horrible thing in your life of sin, 
that you sentence all your Godward powers to a state 
of utter nothingness, to be ears that must not hear, 
eyes that must not see. And then, what must finally 
follow, but that they can not? — p. 175. 

It will be seen that a thoroughly religious old person 
holds the proportions of life, and even grows more mel- 
low and attractive as life advances. Indeed, the most 
beautiful sight on earth is an aged saint of God, grow- 



434 APHORISMS FROM SERMONS 

ing cheerful in his faith, becoming mellowed in his 
love, and more and more visibly pervaded and bright- 
ened by the clear light of religion. — pp. 179, 180. 

And so it is with every soul that refuses God and re- 
ligion. A living creature remains, — a mind, a memory, 
a heart of passion, fears, irritability, will, — all these re- 
main ; nothing is gone but the angel life that stood with 
them, and bound them all to God. — p. 184. 

Make, then, no delay in this first matter of life, the 
choice of God. Give him up thy talent, whole and 
fresh, to be increased by early devotion and a life-long 
fidelity in his service. Call it the dew of thy youth, 
understanding well that when thy sun is fairly up, it 
will like dew be gone. — p. 185. 

If you had the seeds of a pestilence in your body, you 
would not have a more active contagion, than you have 
in your tempers, tastes, and principles. — p. 202. 

Whether it is a mistake more sad or more ridiculous, 
to make mere stir synonymous with doing good, we need 
not inquire ; enough, to be sure that one who has taken 
up such a notion of doing good is for that reason a nui- 
sance to the church. The Christian is called a light, 
not lightning. — p. 203. 

It is folly to endeavor to make ourselves shine before 
we are luminous. — p. 203. 

In the sacred fact of obligation you touch the immu- 
table and lay hold of the eternities. — p. 212. 

It is not self-indulgence allowed, but victory 
achieved, that can make a fit happiness for man. — 
p. 214. 

To let go self-indulgence and try something stronger 
is a call that draws us always, when our heart is up for 
duty; nay, even nature loves heroic impulse and often- 
times prefers the difficult. — p. 214. 

The idea of personal perfection enters only with that 
of obligation to God. — p. 215. 



FOR THE NEW LIFE 435 

It is only religion, the great bond of love and duty to 
God, that makes our existence valuable or even tolera- 
ble. Without this, to live were only to graze. — p. 221. 

Henceforth duty is the brother of liberty, and both 
rejoice in the common motherhood of law. — p. 223. 

[The Christian life] is a life of true joy, the pro- 
foundest and only real joy attainable, — not a merely 
future joy to be received hereafter as the reward of a 
painful and sad life here, but a present, living and com- 
pletely full joy unfolded in the soul of every man whose 
fidelity and constancy permit him to receive it. — p. 225. 

Love is joy, and all true joy is love, — they cannot be 
separated. — p. 238. 

Joy is for all men. It does not depend on circum- 
stance or condition; if it did, it could only be for the 
few. It is not the fruit of good luck nor of fortune 
nor even of outward success, which all men cannot 
have. It is of the soul or the souFs character. — pp. 
239, 240. 

Consider only whether heaven be in you now. For 
heaven, as we have seen, is nothing but the joy of a per- 
fectly harmonized being, filled with God and his love. 
It is the victorious energy of righteousness forever 
established in the soul. — p. 242. 

There are some texts of scripture that suffer a much 
harder lot than any of the martyrs, because their mar- 
tyrdom is perpetual. — p. 243. 

Paradise lost and regained is not a conception only of 
the poet, but it is the grand world-problem of probation 
itself.— p. 247. 

Let it be your life to envy God^s purity, for if there 
be any holy and blessed and fruitful kind of envy, it 
is this.— p. 273. 

There are no fires that will melt out our drossy and 
corrupt particles like God's refining fires of duty and 
trial, living, as he sends us to live, in the open field of 



436 APHORISMS FROM SERMONS 

the world^s sins and sorrows, its plausibilities and lies, 
its persecutions, animosities and fears, its eager de- 
lights and bitter wants. — p. 374. 

Alas! for the man who is obliged to be shut up to 
himself, as in the convent life, to face his own lusts, dis- 
orders and passions, and strangle them in direct con- 
flict, with nothing else to do or to occupy the soul, 
—p. 275. 

Fastidiousness is not any evidence of purity, but the 
contrary. A fastidious character is one that shows by 
excess of delicacy a real defect and loss of it. — p. 278. 

Purity sees God.— p. 278. 

When Christ burst the bars of death, its first and 
final conqueror, he folded the linen clothes and the 
napkin and laid them in order apart, showing that in 
the greatest things he had a set purpose also concern- 
ing the smallest. — p. 286. 

God is as careful to finish the mote as the planet, 
both because it consists only with his perfection to fin- 
ish everything, and because the perfection of his great- 
est structures is the result of perfection in their small- 
est parts or particles. On this patience of detail rests 
all the glory and order of the created universe, spirit- 
ual and material. — p. 286. 

It requires less piety, I verily believe, to be a mar- 
tyr for Christ, than it does to love a powerless enemy, 
or to look upon the success of a rival without envy, or 
even to maintain a perfect and guileless integrity in the 
common transactions of life. — p. 291. 

Christ did not want higher occasions than the Father 
gave him. He was the good carpenter, saving the world! 
—p. 301. 

This is the nature of life or vital force universally, — 
it is a force cumulative as long as it continues. It en- 
ters into matter as a building, organizing, lifting power, 
and knows not how to stop till death stops it. — p. 305. 



FOR THE NEW LIFE 437 

[Men of bad minds] beginning as heroes and demi- 
gods, many of them taper off into awfully intense but 
still little men — intense at a mere point, which appears 
to be the conception of a fiend. Is it so that the bitter- 
ness of hell is finally created ? Is it toward this pnn- 
gent, acrid, awfully intensified and talented littleness 
that all souls under sin are gravitating? — p. 314. 

These angels that excel in strength, these ancient 
princes and hierarchs that have grown up in God's eter- 
nity and unfolded their mighty powers in whole, ages 
of good, recognize in us compeers that are finally to be 
advanced as they are. — p. 324. 

The respectable [sin] and the disgusting are twin 
brothers ; only you see in one how well he can be made 
to look, and in the other how both would look, if that 
which is in both were allowed to have its bent and work 
its own results unrestrained. — p. 333. 

[Vices] hang out a flag of distress upon every shoal 
of temptation. They show us the last results of all sin, 
and the colors in which they exhibit sin are always dis- 
gusting, never attractive. In this view they are really 
one of the moral wants of the world. — p. 336. 

It is the nature of courage to increase in the midst of 
perils and because of them, and courage is the strength 
of the heart.— p. 367. 

These [great master spirits] did not shrink despair- 
ingly within the compass of their poor abilities, but in 
their heart of faith they embraced each one his cause 
and went forth under the inspiring force of their call, 
to apprehend that for which they were apprehended. 
So it is that all the great, efficient men of the world are 
made. They are not strong, but out of weakness they 
are made strong. — p. 370. 

Dependence is the condition of all true holiness, even 
in sinless minds, if such there be. — p. 372. 

Christianity is a grand empowering force in souls. — 
p. 374. 



438 APHORISMS FROM SERMONS 

Make large adventures. Trust in God for great 
things. With your five loaves and two fishes he will 
show you a way to feed thousands. — p. 381. 

The heart might as well be required to live and not 
beat, as the new heart of love to hush itself and keep 
still in the bosom. Nothing can live that is not permit- 
ted to show the signs of life. — p. 388. 

The most fragrant spices are those that honor one's 
life, and not the posthumous odors that embalm his 
body.— p. 391. 

If a man loves God he will take his part with God, 
just as a citizen who loves his country will take the part 
of his country. — p. 393. 

There must be no shallow affectation of delicacy shut- 
ting the lips and sealing them in a forced dumbness, as 
if the righteousness of God had been taken by a deed 
of larceny. — p. 395. 

The true wisdom, in all these matters of holy expe- 
rience, is to act naturally. — p. 396. 

They read Edwards on the Affections, it may be, till 
their affections are all worn out and killed by so much 
jealousy of them, when, if only they could give them 
breath in the open life of duty and sacrifice, they would 
flame up in the soul as heavenly fires, indubitable and 
irrepressible. — p. 397. 

What we want, above all things, in this age, is hearti- 
ness and holy simplicity. — p. 398. 

God made them heroes by simply making them nat- 
ural.— p. 398. 

When law was broken, and all the supports of author- 
ity set up by God's majesty were quite torn away, God 
brought forth a power greater than law, greater than 
majesty, even the power of his patience and by this he 
broke forever the spirit of evil in the world. — p. 404. 

A suffering love is the highest conceivable form of 
greatness. — p. 408. 

You begin to reign, the moment you begin to suffer 
well. — p. 414. 



ON LIVING SUBJECTS 439 

There is no engagement however sacred from which 
God will not sometimes separate ns, that he may clear 
us of our sediment and the reactions of our hidden evils, 
—p. 425. 

There is no class of beings more to be pitied than de- 
feated men, who have gotten nothing out of their de- 
feat but that dry sorrow of the world which makes it 
only more barren, and therefore more insupportable. — 
p. 429. 

Yes, we have had a visitor among us, living out in the 
moulds of human conduct and feeling the perfections 
of God! What an importation of glory and truth! 
Who, that lives, a man, can ever after this think it 
a low and common thing to fill these spheres, walk 
in these ranges of life and do these works of duty, 
which have been raised so high by the life of Jesus 
in the flesh!— p. 448. 

FEOM " SEEMONS ON LIVING SUBJECTS '' 

Loving God is but letting God love us. — Page 38. 

It is vain to imagine that you can let God^s love flow 
in, if you cannot let it flow out. — p. 46. 

Overdoing, if I should not rather say over-undertak- 
ing, is even one of the most common hindrances to 
salvation. — p. 51. 

If there be any good gift that cometh from above and 
cannot be made below, it is character. — p. 66. 

No preaching about bread ever fed anybody. — p. 77. 

The soul lives only when life itself comes; that is, 
when Christ has entered the soul as life. — p. 78. 

The gospel is nothing now, any more than it was at 
the first, unless it is reincarnated and kept incarnate. 
—p. 94. 

See God in the flowers if you will, but ask no gospel 
made up of flowers. — p. 143. 



4:40 APHORISMS FROM SERMONS 

What we call society is the usufruct we have of each 
other. — p. 153. 

A right mind has a right polarity and discovers right 
things hy feeling after them. — p. 173. 

Be never afraid of doubt. — p. 173. 

Be afraid of all sophistries and tricks and strifes of 
disingenuous argument. — ^p. 179. 

Have it a fixed principle also that getting into any 
scornful way is fatal. — p. 180. 

Never settle upon anything as true because it is safer 
to hold it than not. — p. 180. 

Doubt is reason, scorn is disease. — p. 180„ 

Have it as a law never to put force on the mind, or 
try to make it believe. — p. 181. 

N'ever be in a hurry to believe, never try to conquer 
doubts against time. — p. 181. 

If you cannot open a doubt to-day, keep it till to- 
morrow. — p. 182. 

Heaven, the upper-world church, is society oegan- 
IZED, and the church below society oeganizing. — 
p. 289. 

If the sun waited below the horizon for fair weather, 
fair weather would certainly wait for the sun. — p. 289. 

A loose way makes a loose man. — p. 325. 

All knowledge that refuses to know the highest and 
be ended off in the highest is but a sham, a living in the 
bran that rejects the flour. — p. 349. 

Liberty holds high sisterhood with law, nay it is 
twin-born with law itself. — p. 409. 

what worlds-full of great feeling are given us, if 
only we can die into the causes of the worlds ! — p. 412. 

To please him that hath chosen us to be soldiers is 
not so much our thought, as that he will somehow find 
a way to please us. — p. 416. 



FROM MISCELLANEOUS SOURCES 441 



FROM THE "LIFE AND LETTERS'' 

Liberty is the element of all true good. — Page 435. 

Put yourself on the footing of sacrifice. — ^p. 436. 

Nothing is clear that is not cleared by the Spirit. — 
p. 436. 

Faith discerns, opinion manipulates. Faith has noth- 
ing to do with propositions, opinion with nothing else, 
—p. 494. 

Christ is God's last metaphor, " the express image of 
God's person."— p. 502. 

What we want is simply to see. An unfilmed eye is 
the way. — p. 517. 

Forgiveness is man's deepest need and highest 
achievement. — p. 518. 

Great trials make great saints. Deserts and stone 
pillows prepare for an open heaven and an angel- 
crowded ladder. — p. 519. 

A hardened conscience is a great calamity, and a mis- 
guided one is hardly less. — p. 520. 

Abiding in Christ is to abide. It is an act. We are 
not to lash in Christ. — p. 537. 

FROM MISCELLANEOUS SOURCES 

Language in fact is the grand Bridgewater treatise of 
the universe. 

The Bible will be the school-book of philosophy to 
the end of time. 

Man is a creature so quickened by the divine princi- 
ple of intelligence, that he feels the mysterious analogy 
between forms and truths and darts through one to the 
other, scarcely conscious of the transition. 

The truth-world having no form, a form-world must 
be constituted to be its mirror. 



442 APHORISMS FROM 

There must be just so many bodies of truth as there 
are truths to be bodied^ each one having a look or a 
voice or a touch that reveals it, or makes apparition 
of it. 

Not the Bible only reveals him, but the whole temple 
of being, around us and above, is written over with 
spiritual hieroglyphs and radiant with his light. 

When you pray for your industry, see that you have 
industry to pray for. 

As to your prayers for yourself, there must be no 
wedges of gold or treacherous and meanly selfish mo- 
tives creeping in to seduce your integrity. Let your 
prayer be at least honest enough to agree with itself. 

God has likings for men, as men too have for each- 
other, and he will find how to put his favors on such, 
hearing them almost before they speak, because they 
are always going to speak what is right. 

There is a class not muddled by the conceit of their 
judgments, unsophisticated, simple, open at the top 
clear up to the blue, who do find God with a marvellous 
facility and seem to know him by their undoubtingness 
and their always ready trust in him. They are not the 
greatest saints in the world, but the easily believing 
children. 

A class of painfully good people appear to have a 
hope of being perfected by their abstainings from or 
scrupulous not doing of what is forbidden, as if keeping 
the negatives of the ten commandments were a certain- 
ly perfected righteousness. Prudery exhausts their 
idea of holiness. To be perfected in this manner would 
amount to scarcely more than being thoroughly un- 
blest. 

'No man ever prospered who had not his eyes open 
and did not stand ready to do the right thing at the 
right time. 

We can better afford any waste than the waste of 
talent. 



MISCELLANEOUS SOURCES 443 

There is a kind of breadth that would make you a 
superficies only and no substance. That is not for you. 

Do the good you meditate. Or if you can never find 
the time for doing it, have the frankness to confess that 
your good intentions are hollow and worthless. 

As dyers use mordants to set in their colors, so adver- 
sity is the mordant for all sentiments of morality. 

Ko prayer takes hold of God until it first takes hold 
of the man. 

Deem every sin a sacrilege. 

The life of a man is in his heart, and if he does not 
live there, he does not live. 

E'othing had ever yet any great power over man that 
was divorced from feeling. 

How many modes of morbid goodness there may be ! 
— that is, only a little good. 

The soul of all improvement is the improvement of 
the soul. 

Low grades of being want low objects ; but the want 
of man is God. 

Nothing is really hard when we are once in it. 

Anything is well enough if it is only temporary. 

Soften your grief by much thanksgiving. 

All best and noblest things are done, as it were, nat- 
urally. 

You get tangled in questions when you should be 
clear in love. 

To be merely wooed by grace, and tenderly dewed by 
sentiment, makes a Christian mushroom, not a Chris- 
tian man. 

The great crimes are tragic, and the great virtues 
scarcely less so. 

Christianity is a mighty salvation because it is a trag- 
ic salvation. 



444 PICTURE OF A WISE MAN 



PICTURE OF A WISE MAN 

He is one who Tinderstaiids himself well enough to 
make due allowance for unsane moods and varieties, 
never concluding that a thing is thus or thus because 
just now it bears that look ; waiting often to see what a 
sleep, or a walk, or a cool revision, or perhaps a consid- 
erable turn of repentance will do. He does not slash 
upon a subject or a man from the point of a just-now 
rising temper. He maintains a noble candor by wait- 
ing sometimes for a gentler spirit and a better sense of 
truth. He is never intolerant of other men's judg- 
ments, because he is a little distrustful of his own. He 
restrains the dislikes of prejudice because he has a prej- 
udice against his dislikes. His resentments are softened 
by his condemnations of himself. His depressions do 
not crush him, because he has sometimes seen the sun 
and believes it may appear again. He revises his opin- 
ions readily, because he has a right, he thinks, to better 
opinions if he can find them. He holds fast sound opin- 
ions, lest his moodiness in change should take all truth 
away. And if his unsane thinking appears to be top- 
pling him down the gulfs of scepticism, he recovers 
himself by just raising the question whether a more 
sane way of thinking might not think differently. A 
man who is duly aware thus of his own distempered fac- 
ulty makes a life how different from one who acts as if 
he were infallible, and had nothing to do but just to let 
himself be pronounced! There is no true serenity 
that does not come in the train of a wise, self-govern- 
ing modesty. — Moral Uses of Dark Things. — ^p. 269. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Part I. 

THE WRITINGS OF HORACE BUSHNELL 

By Henry Barrett Learned 

[The following bibliography of Dr. Bushnell's writings takes 
only the slightest account of foreign reprints. Prom about 
1846 Dr. Bushnell's pamphlets and, later on, his books got into 
print in London and Edinburgh. They have been and are 
widely read in Great Britain, especially in Scotland. Most of 
the volumes have been reproduced in England and Scotland. 
In the United States his books were printed in several editions. 
Account has been taken, however, only of the editions which 
involved any alteration or revision of phraseology. The com- 
pilation is hardly likely to be free from errors. It would not 
have been as complete as it is without the aid of the authorities 
of the Library of Yale University, especially that of Professor 
F. B. Dexter.] 

1835 
Sermon : Crisis of the Church. Delivered at the North 
Church, Hartford, Conn. [Published by request.] Hart- 
ford : 1835. Pp. 36. 

1837 
Oration : An Oration pronounced before the Society of 
Phi Beta Kappa, at New Haven, on the Principles 
OF National Greatness, August 15, 1837. New Haven : 
1837. Pp. 27. Republished under the title, The True 
Wealth or Weal of Nations, in Work and Play (1864). 

1838 
Article : Spiritual Economy of Revivals of Religion. In 
The Quarterly Christian Speetator (February, 1838), X. 
131-148. Republished in Views of Christian Nurture, etc. 
(1848), and again in Building Eras in Religion (1881). 

1839 
Sermon : A Discourse on the Slavery Question. [Acts 
xxvii. ^i.] Delivered in the North Church, Hartford, 
Thursday evening, January 10, 1839. [Published by re- 
quest.] Hartford: 1839. Pp. 32. Several editions. 
445 



446 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

1839 

Address : REVELATioisr. Delivered before the Porter Rhetori- 
cal Society at Andover, Mass., on Tuesday afternoon, Sep- 
tember 3, 1839. 

JVb^e.— This address was never printed. For a contemporary comment on it 
see Boston Recorder^ September 13, 1839. Selections from it are given in 
The Spirit in Man (1903). 

1840 
Sermon : American Politics. [John xix. 12.^ In The Ameri- 
can National Preacher (New York, December, 1840), XIV. 
189-204. 

^ote.— Written before the national election of 1840 in opposition to the spoils' 
system and to woman's suffrage. 

1842 

Address : The Stability of Change. Delivered at the Com- 
mencement of Western Reserve College, Hudson, O., August 
9, 1842. 

Lecture: The Vital Principle. Delivered at Western Re- 
serve College, Hudson, O., August 9, 1842. Afterw^ard 
published as Life, or the Lives, in Work and Play (1864). 

Note.— The Address delivered at Hudson was probably substantially the same as 
the paper printed many years later under the title. Of the Mutabilities of 
Life, in Moral Uses of Dark Things (1868). The Lecture had not been 
specially prepared for the occasion. It was given " at the special request of 
some members of the Faculty " of the college, and was delivered on various 
occasions at Hartford and elsewhere. See the Ohio Observer of August 18, 
1842— a weekly paper edited by Rev. E. P. Barrows of Hudson— for com- 
ments upon both the Address and the Lecture. 

1843 

Article: Taste and Fashion. In The New Englander (April, 
1843), I. 153-168. 

Oration : A Discourse on the Moral Tendencies and Re- 
sults OF Human History. Delivered before the Society 
of Alumni in Yale College, on Wednesday, August 16, 
1843. Published by request of the Society. New Haven : 
1843. Pp. 39. 

Another edition. New York, New Haven, Hartford : 

1843. Pp. 32. 

Republished as The Growth of Law, in Work and Play 

(1864). 

Letter: To the Editor of the Religious Herald. Dated 
December 14, 1843. % column. In The Religious Herald, 
Hartford, of December 20, 1843. 

Note.— A refusal to enter into controversy on the subject of his views as ex- 
pressed in his oration of the previous August in New Haven. 



BTBLIOGRAPHY 447 

1844 
Article: Review of the Errors of the Times. In The New 
Englander (January, 1844), II. 143-175. Reprinted in 
pamphlet form — Review of the Errors of the Times : a 
charge, by the Rt. Rev. T. C. Brownell, D.D„ LL.D., 
Bishop of the Diocese of Connecticut. Hartford : 1844. 
Pp. 51 (including prefatory note by the author). 

Note. — The "charge" was delivered by Bishop Brownell to the clergy of the 
Connecticut Diocese at the annual convention held in Christ Church, Hart- 
ford, June 13, 1843. 

Sermon: The Great Time-Keeper. [Genesis i. i^.] In The 
American National Preacher (January, 1844), XVIII. 
1-9. Republished in The Spirit in Man (1903). 

Letter : To the Religious Herald, Hartford, of January 24, 
1844. Vs column. 

jybfe.— Eefusal to enter into controversy with the editor of the Christian Secre- 
tary as to his views. 

Letter : " A Church Without a Bishop." Addressed to The 
Religious Herald, Hartford, of March 20, 1844. 

Note. — Calls attention to Coleman's new book, The Apostolical and Primitive 
Church, with approval. 

Sermon : Politics Under the Law of God. [Isaiah xxx. 11.} 
A Discourse delivered in the North Congregational 
Church, Hartford, on the Annual Fast of 1844. Hart- 
ford : 1844. Pp. 23. At least four editions. 

Article : The Kingdom of Heaven as a Grain of Mustard 
Seed. In The New Englander (October, 1844), II. 600- 
619. Republished under the title. Growth, not Conquest, 
the True Method of Christian Progress, in Views of Chris- 
tian Nurture, etc. (1848). 

Letter : Reply to Dr. Taylor. Signed " Constans." In The 
Christian Freeman (Hartford) for December 12, 1844. 4 
columns. 

Note.—DT. Taylor, of New Haven, having been asked the question whether a 
Christian could consistently with the word of God cast his vote for either a 
duellist or an oppressor of the poor as President of the United States, had re- 
plied at some length in the affirmative in a published letter. Bushnell re- 
viewed Dr. Taylor's argument, refuting it. He was led into some discussion 
of the nature and authority of civil government. 

1845 
Sermon: The Moral Uses of the Sea. [Genesis i. 10.] De- 
livered on board the packet-ship Victoria, Captain Mor- 
gan, at sea, July, 1845. Published by request of the 
Captain and Passengers. New York : 1845. Pp. 20. 
Revised and republished under the title. Of the Sea, in 
Moral Uses of Dark Things (1868). 



44:8 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

1845 

Letter: A Letter from Dr. Bushnell. Dated Geneva, Oc- 
tober 7, 1845. 2 columns. In The Religious Herald 
(Hartford), November 8, 1845. 

iV^ote.,— Impressions of Belgium, Alsace, Germany and Switzerland ; with com- 
ments on Ronge and Czerski and the new Eeformed Church in Grermany, 
and on the Jews in Frankfm-t. 

1846 

Letter: [The Oregon Question.], Addressed to the Editor 
OF the London Universe, March 3, 1846. Signed " An 
American." 3 columns. Reprinted in The Religious 
Herald (Hartford) of April 4, 1846. 3^ columns, under 
the heading, Dr. Bushnell in London. 

Note. — This letter was first sent to the London Morning Chronicle and was 
immediately returned by the editor. It was a consideration of the causes of 
the diflaculties between Great Britain and the United States, especially those 
concerning the Oregon country. Extracts from the letter were first printed 
in this country in 2'he Religious Herald of March 28, 1846. The following 
week (April 4, 1846) the letter appeared in full. 

Letter : A Letter to His Holiness, Pope Gregory XVI. 
Dated London: April 2, 1846. Ward & Co., 27 Pater- 
noster Row. 1846. Pp. 24. 

Note. — This pamphlet is recorded in the catalogue of the British Museum, It 
was reprinted in The Religious Herald (Hartford), May 9, 1846 (4^ col- 
umns), and aroused some opposition. See The Religious Herald of June 20, 
1846—" The Letter to the Pope among the Papists." It was translated (con- 
siderably abbreviated) into Italian, appearing as Lettera al Romano Ponte- 
fice in the appendix of a volume entitled Degli ultimi casi di Komagna, by 
the Marquis Massimo Tapparelli d'Azegho (Lugano : 1846). Recorded in 
the Index Expurgatorius. Reprinted in Building Eras in Religion (1881). 

Sermon : Unconscious Influence. {John xx. 8.] Published 
by request. London : 1846. Republished in The Ameri- 
can National Preacher (August, 1846), XX. 169-179, un- 
der title. Influence of Example, and again in Sermons for 
the New Life (1858). 

iVbte.— This sermon was preached in London in March or April, 1846. It was 
reprinted in Great Britain at various times, e.g., Edinburgh, 1849 ; London, 



Sermon : Uses and Duties of Stormy Sundays. [Psalms 
cxviii. 8.] In The American Pulpit (Worcester, October, 
1846), II. 123-133. 

Address: An Address Before the Hartford County Agri- 
cultural Society. Delivered October 2, 1846. Hart- 
ford : 1846. Pp. 24. Republished as Agriculture at the 
East, in Work and Play (1864), early editions only 
(1864-1881). 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 449 

1846 

Sermon: The Day of Roads. [Judges v. 6.} A Discourse 
delivered on the Annual Thanksgiving, 1846. Hartford: 
1846. Pp. 35. Republished in Work and Play (1864). 

1847 

Article : The Evangelical Alliance. In The New England- 
er (January, 1847), V. 102-125. Republished same year 
in pamphlet form. New York : Baker & Scribner. 
Pp. 32. 

Letter : Addressed to the North Consociation of Hartford 
County. In The New England Religious Herald (Hart- 
ford), January 9, 1847. 1^/^ columns. 

JVofe.— Strictures on the new by-laws and regulations of the Hartford Central 
Consociation. 

Sermon : Prosperity Our Duty. [2 Chronicles xxxii. SO.I A 
Discourse delivered at the North Church, Hartford, Sab- 
bath evening, January 31, 1847. [Published by request.] 
Hartford: 1847. Pp. 24. Republished in The Spirit in 
Man (1903). 

Book: DISCOURSES ON CHRISTIAN NURTURE. (Ap- 
proved by the Committee of Publication. ) Boston : Mas- 
sachusetts Sabbath School Society. Pp. 72. Introduc- 
tory note and two discourses. 

JTote.— Suppressed after a few months by the Massachusetts Sabbath School 
Society. 

Letter: To the Editor of The New England Religious 
Herald. In The New England Religious Herald of Oc- 
tober 16, 1847. 3-,V columns. 

Note.— A. reply to certain misrepresentations of Bushnell's views of Christian 
Nurture. 

Pamphlet : An Argument for " Discourses on Christian 
Nurture," addressed to the Publishing Committee of the 
Massachusetts Sabbath School Society. Hartford. Pp. 48. 
Republished in Views of Christian Nurture (1848). 

Address : Barbarism the First Danger. {Judges xvii. 13.^ 
A Discourse for Home Missions. New York : The Amer- 
ican Home Missionary Society, 1847. Pp. 32. Repub- 
lished in Work and Play, second edition. 

JV'ote.— Delivered in New York, Boston, and other places in May and June, 1847. 
This was the first public address through which Bushnell became widely 
•known. 



450 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

1848 

Book : VIEWS O P CHRISTIAN NURTURE and of Subjects 
Adjacent Thereto. Second edition. Hartford, New York, 
and Boston: 1848 [1847c.]. Pp. 251. 

Contents: Discourse (I.) on Christian Nurture. Dis- 
course (II.) on Christian Nurture. Argument for Dis- 
courses on Christian Nurture. Spiritual Economy of Re- 
vivals of Religion (see 1838). Growth, not Conquest, 
the True Method of Christian Progress (see 1844). The 
Organic Unity of the Family (a sermon, Jeremiah vii. 
18). The Scene of the Pentecost and a Christian Parish 
(a sermon, Acts ii. Jf^-Jfl). 

Note.— This, the second edition of Bushnell's first book (1847), very much en- 
larged by the additions, was almost wholly rewritten and published in its 
third form in 1861 {.q.v.j. 

Article: Christian Comprehensiveness. In The JSlew Eng- 
lander (January, 1848), VI. 81-111. Republished in 
Building Eras in Religion (1881). 

Address : A Discourse on the Atonement. Delivered before 
the Divinity School in Harvard University, July 9, 1848. 
Published as third article in God in Christ (1849). 

Address : Concio ad Clerum : A Discourse on the Divinity 
of Christ. Delivered at the Annual Commencement of 
Yale College, August 15, 1848. Published as second arti- 
cle in God in Christ (1849). 

Oration : Work and Play. An Oration delivered before the 
Society of Phi Beta Kappa, at Cambridge, August 24, 1848. 
Cambridge: 1848. Pp. 39. At least 3 editions. Repub- 
lished as first article in Work and Play (1864). 

Address: A Discourse on Dogma and Spirit, or the True 
Reviving of Religion. Delivered before the Porter Rhe- 
torical Society, at Andover, September, 1848. Published 
as fourth article in God in Christ (1849). 



1849 

Book : GOD IN CHRIST. Three Discourseg delivered at 
New Haven, Cambridge and Andover, with a preliminary 
Dissertation on Language. Hartford : 1849. Pp. 356. 
Contents : I. Preliminary Dissertation on the Nature of 
Language as related to Thought and Spirit. II. The 
Divinity of Christ. III. The Atonement. IV. Dogma 
and Spirit, or the True Reviving of Religion. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 451 

1849 
Sermon: The Moral Uses of Great Pestilen^ces. [Deuter- 
onomy wwix. 24.] A Discourse delivered in the North 
Church, Hartford, on the Occasion of the National Fast, 
August 3, 1849. In The American Literary Magazine 
(August), V. 81-94. Reprinted in pamphlet. Hartford: 
1849. Pp. 16. Revised and republished as Of Plague and 
Pestilence, in Moral Uses of Dark Things (1868). 

1850 

Oration: The Fathers of New England. Delivered before 
the New England Society of New York, December 21, 
1849, and published at their request. New York : George 
P. Putnam. 1850. Pp. 44. Republished as The Founders 
Great in their Unconsciousness, in Work and Play (1864). 
Reprinted in The New England Society Orations. 1820- 
1885. Collected and edited by Cephas Brainerd and Eve- 
line Warner Brainerd. New York : The Century Com- 
pany, 1901. II. 83-120. 

1851 

Book : CHRIST IN THEOLOGY : Being the Answer of the 
Author before the Hartford Central Association of Minis- 
ters, October, 1849, for the Doctrines of the Book entitled 
"God in Christ." Hartford: 1851. Pp. 348. 
Contents : Preface. Introductory. Language and Doc- 
trine. The Person of Christ. The Trinity. The Work 
of Christ. Conclusion. 

JVote.— This book was afterward withdrawn from publication by the author. 

Address : Speech for Connecticut. Being an Historical Es- 
timate of the State, delivered before the Legislature and 
other invited guests at the Festival of the Normal School 
in New Britain, June 4, 1851. Hartford : 1851. Pp. 43. 
Republished as Historical Estimate of Connecticut, in 
Work and Play (1864). 

Discourse: The Age of Homespun. Delivered at Litchfield, 
Conn., on the occasion of the Centennial Celebration, 1851. 
Pp. 107-130. In Litchfield County Centennial Celebra- 
tion. Hartford : 1851, Reprinted separately with same 
pagination. Republished in Work and Play (1864). 

1852 
Discourse: Religious Music. [1 Corinthians xiv. 7.] Hart- 
ford: 1852. Pp. 5-31. 

JVo**?.— This discourse was delivered first in the North Church, Hartford— date 
unknown— at the openings of a new organ. It was repeated Tsith some varia- 
tions before the Beethoven Society of Yale College, at the twenty-fifth anni- 
versary of the organization, July "2S, 1851. It was published in a pamphlet 
alone: with a discourse on the same subject delivered by Kev. Thomas M. 
Clark (now— 1903— Bishop of Rhode Island) at Christ Church, Hartford, on 
Trinity Sunday, 1852. Dr. Bushnell's discourse was republished in Work 
and Play (1864). 



452 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

1852 
Lecture: [Revealed Religion.] Romans viii. 22. 

Note.— The annual Dudleian lecture delivered at Cambridge, Mass., on May 12, 
1852. Pp. 63, sm. quarto, MS. in the Harvard College Library, See Life and 
Letters (1880), p. 257. where Dr. B. speaks of this as his last lecture on the 
Supernatural. See Nature and the Supernatui-al, Chap. XV. 

Letter : Remonstrance from Dr. Bushnell. Addressed to 
the General Association of Connecticut. In The New 
England Religious Herald, June 19, 1852. 1% columns. 

Note.— A. protest against all intermeddling in his case. 

1853 

Sermon : Common Schools. A Discourse on the Modifica- 
tions demanded by the Roman Catholics VLeviticus wxiv. 
22^, delivered in the North Church, Hartford, on the 
day of the late Fast, March 25, 1853. Hartford: 1853. 
Pp. 24. Republished in Building Eras in Religion (1881). 

Sermon: Twentieth Anniversary. [PMlippians i. 5.] A 
Commemorative Discourse delivered in the North Church, 
Hartford, May 22, 1853. Hartford: 1853. Pp. 32. See 
Life and Letters of Horace Bushnell (1880), p. 279. 

Report of the Committee concerning the Proposed Public 
Park. [Addressed] To the Honorable, the Court of Com- 
mon Council of the City of Hartford, November 14, 1853. 
Pp. 8. 

Note.— The substance of the report was Dr. Bushnell's. 

1854 

Sermon : The Northern Iron. [Jeremiah xv. 12.1 A Dis- 
course delivered in the North Church, Hartford, on the 
Annual State Fast, April 14, 1854. Published by request. 
Hartford: 1854. Pp. 29. 

Letter : Addressed to Rev. Dr. Hawes. Dated Hartford, 
April 3, 1854. In The New England Religious Herald 
(Hartford), June 1, 1854. See Life and Letters of Horace 
Bushnell (1880), p. 337. 

Speech : Made by Dr. Bushnell at the General Associa- 
tion OF Connecticut (New Haven), in June, 1854. 
Quoted (2 columns) in The New England Religious Her- 
nld, July 6, 1854. 

Article: The Christian Trinity a Practical Truth. In 
The New Englander (November, 1854), XII. 485-509. Re- 
published in Building Eras in Religion (1881). 
1855 

Letter : Correspondence : Letter dated New York, January 
15, 1855. In The New England Religious Herald, Janu- 
ary 18, 1855, in answer to one from J. N. Murdock, who 
had handed Bushnell a certificate of membership in the 
American Baptist Missionary Union. Bushnell accepts. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 453 

1856 
Letter: Letter from Dr. Bushnell. Dated San Francisco, 
May 19, 1856. In The Independent (New York), July 
3, 1856. 1 column. 

Note.— The letter opens : "I suppose you will Bot be offended by a volunteer 
letter about the big trees of California which I have just visited." 

Sermon : Society and Religion [Jeremiah i. 10] : A Sermon 
for California, delivered on Sabbath evening, July 6, 
1856, at the Installation of Rev. E. S. Lacy as Pastor of 
the First Congregational Church, San Francisco. Hart- 
ford : 1856. Pp. 32. 

1857 

Movement for a University in California. A Statement 
to the Public by the Trustees of the College of California, 
and an Appeal by Dr. Bushnell. San Francisco : 1857. 
Pp. 23. 

Note. — The "appeal" covers pages 9-23. 

Sermon : Spiritual Dislodgements. [Jeremiah xlviii. 11.] A 
Sermon of Reunion, preached in the North Church, Hart- 
ford, February 22, 1857. Hartford: 1857. Pp. 21. Re- 
published in Sermons for the New Life (1858). 

Sermon : A Week-Day Sermon to the Business Men op 
Hartford. [Acts xwvii. 15.] In the Supplement to The 
Courant, Hartford, October 31, 1857. 5^/^ columns. Re- 
published in The Spirit in Man (1903). 

Note. — This sermon was preached in the North Church, Hartford, Tuesday, 
October 20, 1867. It had reference to the financial crisis of the year. 

Sermon : Thanksgiving for Kansas. [Islumlers xi. 10.] 

^o<e.— Written with reference to the struggle to make Kansas a free State. De- 
Uvered November 26, 1857, in Hartford. See Life and Letters of Horace 
Bushnell (1880), p. 411. Printed, complete or in part, in some newspaper. 
A newspaper clipping is to be seen in the Wadsworth Athenseum, Hartford, 
as evidence. 

1858 
Article: California, Its Characteristics and Prospects. 
In The New Englander (February, 1858), XVI. 142-182. 
Reprinted (pp. 42) ; also reissued in pamphlet. San 
Francisco: 1858. 
Address : City Plans. Written for the Public Improvement 
Society of Hartford. Not delivered. Date doubtful. Pub- 
lished in Work and Play (1864). 
Book: SERMONS FOR THE NEW LIFE. New York: 
Charles Scribner. 1858. Pp. 456. Many editions. Re- 
prints in England and Scotland. Revised in 1903. 
Contents : I. Every Man's Life a Plan of God. — Isaiah 
xlv. 5. II. The Spirit in Man. — Jo6 xxxii. 8. III. Dig- 
nity of Human Nature Shov^n from its Ruins. — Romans 
Hi. 13-18. IV. The Hunger of the Soul.— LwA;e xv. 17. 
V. The Reason of Faith. — John vi. 36. VI. Regeneration. 



4:54 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

John in. 3. VII. The Personal Love and Lead of Christ. 
— John X. 3. VIII. Light on the Cloud. — Job xxxvii. 21. 
IX. The Capacity of Religion Extirpated by Disuse. — 
Matthew xxv. 28. X. Unconscious Influence. — John xx. 
8. XL Obligation a Privilege. — Psalms cxix. 5Jf. XII. 
Happiness and Joy. — John xv. 11. XIII. The True Prob- 
lem of Christian Experience. — Revelation ii. If. XIV. 
The Lost Purity Restored. — 1 John in. 3. XV. Living 
to God in Small Things. — Luke xvi. 10. XVI. The Power 
of an Endless Life. — Hebrews vii. 16. XVII. Respectable 
Sin.— Jo/tn viii. 9. XVIII. The Power of God in Self-Sac- 
rifice. — 1 Corinthians i. 24. XIX. Duty Not Measured by 
Our Own Ability. — Luke ix. 13. XX. He That Knows 
God will Confess Uim.— Psalms xl. 10. XXI. The Effi- 
ciency of the Passive Virtues. — Revelation i. 9. XXII. 
Spiritual Dislodgements. — Jeremiah xlviii. 11. XXIII. 
Christ as Separate from the World. — Hebrews vii. 26. 
JVoic— Dedication to the people of his Churcli, in Hartford. 

Book: NATURE AND THE SUPERNATURAL, as together 
constituting the One System of God. New York : Charles 
Scribner, 1858. Pp. 528. Many editions. Reprints in 
England and Scotland. Printed from new plates in 1903. 

Note.— In May, 1864, Bushnell, in reply to criticisms of this work, wrote a new 
preface called " Preface to the Second Edition," thus adding six pages to the 
original which are not accounted for in the 528 pages. This preface of 1864 
has been omitted in the edition of 1903. The pagination was irregular from 
1864 to 1903. 

Tract: Position and Power. Occasional, No. 2. Boston: 
The American Tract Society. Pp. 8. 

Note.— TMs tract was published in 1858, or in the spring of 1859. It is noted as 
one of the year's publications at the annual meeting of the Tract Society in 
May, 1859. It contains (pp. 6-8) an extract from the sermon. On the Power 
of an Endless Life, previously published in Sermons for the New Life (1858). 

Letter : Correspondence. Letter in reply to one from the 
North Church and Society, signed by all the members of 
the Church and Society [17 May, 1858]. Dated Hartford, 
June 15, 1858. Addressed to Normand Smith, A. M. Col- 
lins, and others. In The New England Religious Herald, 
July 8, 1858. 

1859 

Sermon : Parting Words. [Jeremiah xxii. 10.] A Discourse 
delivered in the North Church, Hartford, July 3, 1859. 
Published by request. Hartford : 1859. Pp. 25. 

Note.— A farewell to his people on giving up his pastorate. 

Letter: To The Courant. Hartford. Dated St. Anthony, 
Minn., August, 1859. i*ublished in Hartford, Friday, Au- 
gust 12, 1859. V2 column. 

jVofe.— Merely a glimpse of his surroundings in Minnesota, 



BIBLIOeRAPHY 455 

1860 
Sermon: The Census and Slavery. [Isaiah xxvi. 15.^ A 
Thanksgiving Discourse delivered in the Chapel at Clif- 
ton Springs, N. Y., November 29, 1860. Hartford : 1860. 
Pp. 24. 

1861 
Book : THE CHARACTER OP JESUS : Forbidding his Pos- 
sible Classification with Men. New York : Charles Scrib- 
ner, 1861 [1860c.]. Pp. 173. 

Note.— TMb small volume was a reprint- slightly altered— of the tenth chapter 
of the treatise Nature and the Siipernalural (1858). It appeared very soon in 
Scotch and English editions, and was translated into Spanish under the 
title Cristo. Estudio Pilosofico por H. Bushnell. Madrid : 1881. Pp. 75 
(pp. 3-6 consist of Prefacio del Traductor, Thomafe L. Gulick). 

Book : CHRISTIAN NURTURE. [Isaiah liv. 13.} New York : 
Charles Scribner, 1861 [1860c.]. Pp. 407. Reprints in 
England and Scotland. 
Contents : Part I. — The Doctrine. 

I. What Christian Nurture is. — Ephesians vi. 4- H- 
What Christian Nurture is. — Ephesians vi. 4- HI- The 
Ostrich Nurture. — Lamentations iv. 3. IV. The Organic 
Unity of the Family. — Jeremiah vii. 18. V. Infant Bap- 
tism, How Developed. — Acts ii. 39. VI. Apostolic Author- 
ity of Infant Baptism. — 1 Corinthians i. 16. VII. Church 
Membership of Children. — Colossians i. 2. VIII. The 
Out-Populating Power of the Christian Stock. — Malachi 
ii. 15. 
Part II.— The Mode. 

I. When and Where the Nurture Begins. — 2 Timothy i. 5. 

II. Parental Qualifications. — Genesis xviii. 19. III. Physi- 
cal Nurture to be a Means of Grace. — Proverhs xxx. 
8-9. IV. The Treatment that Discourages Piety. — Colos- 
sians Hi. 21. V. Family Government. — 1 Timothy Hi. 4- 
VI. Plays and Pastimes, Holidays and Sundays. — Zecha- 
riah viii. 5. VII. The Christian Teaching of Children. — 
2 Timothy Hi. llf. VIII. Family Prayers. — Rosea ii. 
21-22. 

Sermon : Reverses Needed. [Proverbs xxiv. 10.1 A Discourse 
delivered on the Sunday [July 28, 1861] after the Dis- 
aster of Bull Run, in the North Church, Hartford. Hart- 
ford : 1861. Pp. 27. Republished in The Spirit in Man 
(1903). 

1863 

Article : The Doctrine of Loyalty. In The New Englander 
(July, 1863), XXII. 560-581. Republished in Work and 
Play (1864). 

Wote.— Ori^nally prepared as an address for a public occasion, but not coin- 
pleted in time. 



456 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

1864 
Book: "WORK AND PI.AY; or Literary Varieties. New 

York : Charles Scribner, 1864. Pp. 464. Revised in 1881 
and in 1903. 

Contents: I. Work and Play. II. The True Wealth or 
Weal of Nations. III. The Growth of Law. IV. The 
Founders Great in their Unconsciousness. V. Historical 
Estimate of Connecticut. VI. Agriculture at the East. 
VII. Life, or the Lives. VIII. City Plans. IX. The Doc- 
trine of Loyalty. X. The Age of Homespun. XI. The 
Day of Roads. XII. Religious Music. 

Note.— A revised edition of this book was issued in 1881 with the substitution of 
Barbarism the First Danger in place of No. VI. Agriculture at the East. 
New York : Charles Scribner. Pj). 470. It was designated as Volume I. among 
three volumes of Literary Varieties. See 1868, 1881 and 1903. 

Book : CHRIST AND HIS SALVATION : In Sermons Vari- 
ously Related Thereto. New York : Charles Scribner. 
1864. Pp. 456. 

Contents : I. Christ Waiting to Find Room. — LuJce ii. 7. 
II. The Gentleness of God. — Psalms xviii. 35. III. The 
Insight of Love. — Mark wiv. 8. IV. Salvation for the Lost 
Condition. — Matthew xviii. 11. V. The Fasting and 
Temptation of Jesus. — Matthew iv. 1, 2. VI. Conviction 
of Sin by the Cross. — John xvi. 9-11. VII. Christ Asleep. 
— Matthew viii. 24. VIII. Christian Ability. — James Hi. 
4. IX. Integrity and Grace. — Psalms vii. 8. X. Liberty 
and Discipline. — Mark ii. 19, 20. XI. Christ's Agony, or 
Moral Suffering, — Luke xxii. 44- XII. The Physical Suf- 
fering, or Cross of Christ. — Hebrews ii. 10. XIII. Salva- 
tion by Man. — 1 Corinthians xv. 21. XIV. The Bad Con- 
sciousness Taken Away. — Hebrews x. 2. XV. The Bad 
Mind Makes a Bad Element. — John viii. 48. XVI. Pres- 
ent Relations of Christ with His Followers. — John xiv. 
28. XVII. The Wrath of the Lamb. — Revelation vi. 16, 
17. XVIII. Christian Forgiveness. — Ephesians iv. 32. 
XIX. Christ Bearing the Sins of Transgressors. — Hebrews 
ix. 28. XX. The Putting on of Christ. — Romans xiii. I4. 
XXI. Heaven Opened. — John i. 51. 

Note.— This book is dedicated (June 10, 1864) to Joseph Sampson of New York. 
In the revised edition the volume is entitled Sermons on Christ and His 
Salvation. See 1877. 

Sermon : Populae Government by Divine Right. [Jeremiah 
XXX. 21.'\ Delivered on the late National Thanksgiving 
(November 24, 1864), in the South Church, Hartford, be- 
fore the Congregations of that and the South Baptist 
Church. Hartford: 1864. Pp. 16. Republished in 
Building Eras in Religion (1881). 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 457 

1865 
Article : Abjuration of America. In Hours at Home (July, 
1865), I. 244-245. 

J\ro«f.— Comments on " a hymn that bears no vestige of the continent but the 
name." 

Oration; Our Obligations to the Dead. Delivered at the 
Gommemorative Celebration, held July 26, 1865, in honor 
of the Alumni of Yale College who were in the Military 
or Naval Service of the United States during the Recent 
War. In Addresses and Proceedings at the Commemora- 
tive Celebration. New Haven : 1866. Pp. 9-38. Repub- 
lished in Building Eras in Religion (1881). 
1866 
Book : THE VICARIOUS SACRIFICE, Grounded in Princi- 
ples of Universal Obligation. New York : Charles 
Scribner & Co., 1866 [1865c.]. Pp. 552. See 1874 and 
1877. 
Article : The Natural History of the Yaguey Family. In 

Hours at Home (March, 1866), II. 413-418. 
Sermon : Religious Nature and Religious Character. 
[Acts xvii. 27.] In The Monthly Religious Magazine 
(March, 1866), XXXV. 156-169. Republished in Ser- 
mons on Living Subjects (1872). 
Address : Pulpit Talent. Delivered before the Porter Rhe- 
torical Society of Andover Theological Seminary at their 
Anniversary, September, 1866. In Hours at Home (Oc- 
tober, 1866), III. 485-499. Republished in Building Eras 
in Religion (1881). 
Sermon : [Discourse in Memory of Rev. Dr. Noah Por- 
ter.] Psalms Ixxi. 9. In Memorial of Noah Porter, D.D., 
late of Farmington, Conn., comprising the Discourses of 
President T. D. Woolsey, Rev. Levi L. Paine, and Horace 
Bushnell, D.D., occasioned by his Death. Farmington : 
1867. Pp. 75. 
Note.— Dr. Bushnell's sermon occupies pp. 41-63. It was preached the third 
Sunday (October 14, 1866) after Dr. Porter's death, in the pulpit of Dr. 
Porter's church in Farmington. Because of a severe storm Dr. Bushnell 
had been prevented from attending the funeral services in September. Dr. 
Porter died September 24, 1866. Published with slight alterations as the fol- 
lowing article. 

Article: How to Make a Ripe and Right Old Age. In 
Hours at Home (December, 1866), IV. 106-112. 
1867 

Article: Moral Uses of Dark Things. I. Of Night and 
Sleep. In Hours at Home (February, 1867), IV. 289- 
297. Republished as the first paper in Moral Uses of 
Dark Things (1868). 

Note.— The first of a series of thirteen articles to appear in Hours at Home, which, 
enlarged by several additions, formed a volume in 1868 (g. v.). 



458 BIBLIOGEAPHY 

1867 
Article: II. Of Non-Intercotjrse Between Worlds. In 
Hours at Home (March, 1867), IV. 385-393. Republished 
in Moral Uses of Dark Things (1868). 

Sermon : Building Eras in Religion, Delivered at the 
Dedication of the Park Church, Hartford, Conn., on Fri- 
day evening, March 29, 1867. 

Xote.— First published in Hours at Home (September, 1868), VII. 385-394. It 
api)ear8 as the first paper in the book, Building Eras in Religion (1881), to 
which it gives the title. 

Article : III. Bad Government or Bad Men in Power. In 
Hours at Home (April, 1867), IV. 481-488. Repub- 
lished in Moral Uses of Dark Things (1868). 

Article : IV. Of Want and Waste. In Hours at Home 
(May, 1867), V. 1-9. Republished in Moral Uses of 
Dark Things (1868). 

Article : V. Of the Condition of Solidarity. In Hours at 
Home (June, 1867), V. 97-105. Republished in Moral 
Uses of Dark Things (1868). 

Article : VI. Of Oblivion, or Dead History. In Hours at 
Home (July, 1867), V. 212-220. Republished in Moral 
Uses of Dark Things (1868). 

Article : VII. Of the Animal Infestations. In Hours at 
Home (August, 1867), V. 307-315. Republished in Moral 
Uses of Dark Things (1868). 

Article: VIII. Of Physical Pain. In Hours at Home (Sep- 
tember, 1867), V. 385-394. Republished in Moral Uses of 
Dark Things (1868). 

Sermon : The Value One Man Has to Another. [2 Corin- 
thians xii. 14.] In The Advance (Chicago). Thursday, 
September 5, 1867. Vol. I., No. 1. Republished as The 
Property Right We Are to Get in Souls, in Sermons on 
Living Subjects (1872). 

Article: IX. Of Things Unsightly and Disgustful. In 
Hours at Home (November, 1867), VI. 1-9. Republished 
in Moral Uses of Dark Things (1868). 

Article: X. Of Insanity. In Hours at Home (December, 
1867), VI. 97-106. Republished in Moral Uses of Dark 
Things (1868). 

1868 
Article: XI. Of Physical Danger. In Hours at Home 
(January, 1868), VI. 193-201. Republished in Moral 
Uses of Dark Things (1868). 



BIBLIOGKAPHY 459 

1868 
Sermon : What It Is to Preach Christ. [2 Corinthians iv. 
6.] In The Advance (Chicago). Thursday, January 2, 
1868. Vol. I., No. 18. Republished as The Gospel of the 
Face, in Sermons on Living Subjects (1872). 

Article: XII. Of the Mutabilities of Life. In Hours at 
Home (February, 1868), VI. 296-305. Republished in 
Moral Uses of Dark Things (1868). See 1842. 

Article : The Law of Feeding as Pertaining to Souls. In 

The Advance (Chicago). Thursday, February 13, 1868. 

Vol. L, No. 24. 
Article : The Learning How to Feed. In The Advance 

(Chicago). Thursday, February 20, 1868. Vol. I., 

No. 25. 
Article: XIII. Of Winter. In Hours at Home (March, 

1868), VI. 406-414. Republished in Moral Uses of Dark 

Things (1868). 
Article : Science and Religion. In Putnam's Magazine 

(March, 1868), I. 265-275. 
Article: Meaning and Use of the Lord's Supper. In The 

Advance (Chicago). Thursday, March 5, 1868. Vol. I., 

No. 27. 

Note.— The Extracts, Meaning of the Supper, printed in the Spirit in Man (1903), 
are taken, not from this article, but from a sermon in MS., written in 1849. 

Address : Training for the Pulpit Manward. Delivered at 
the decennial anniversary of the Chicago Theological Sem- 
inary, before the Rhetorical Society, Wednesday, April 
29, 1868. In Hours at Home (July, 1868), VII. 193-203. 
Republished in Building Eras in Religion (1881). 

Article: Distinctions of Color. In Hours at Home (May, 
1868), VII. 81-89. Republished in Moral Uses of Dark 
Things (1868). 

Book: JttORALi USES OP DARK THINGS. New York: 
Charles Scribner & Co., 1868. Pp. 360. Revised in 1881 
and in 1903. 

Contents: I. Of Night and Sleep. II. Of Want and 
Waste. III. Of Bad Government. IV. Of Oblivion, or 
Dead History. V. Of Physical Pain. VI. Of Physical 
Danger. VII. Of the Conditions of Solidarity. VIII. Of 
Non-Intercourse Between Worlds. IX. Of Winter. X. 
Of Things Unsightly and Disgustful. XL Of Plague and 
Pestilence. XII. Of Insanity. XIII. Of the Animal In- 
festations. XIV. Of Distinctions of Color. XV. Of the 
Mutabilities of Life. XVI. Of the Sea. 

Note.— In the uniform edition this volume appears as Volume II. among the 
three volumes of Literary Varieties. See 1864, 1881 and 1903. 



460 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

1869 

Article: Progeess. In Hours at Home (January, 1869), 
VIII. 199-210. 

Article : Hartford Park. In Hearth and Home ( Saturday, 
February 6, 1869), I. 101-102. Reprinted almost entire 
in Life and Letters of Horace Bushnell (1880), 312-319. 

JVbfe.— Written at the request of Mr. Donald G. Mitchell. 

Sermon : God's Thoughts Fit Bread for Children. 
[Psalms cxxxix. 11. '\ A Sermon preached before the Con- 
necticut Sunday-School Teachers' Convention at the Pearl 
Street Congregational Church, Hartford, Conn., Tuesday 
evening, March 2, 1869. Published by request of the Con- 
vention. Boston: 1869. Pp. 38. Bound in Cloth. Re- 
published in The Spirit in Man (1903). 

Book: AVOMEN'S SUFFRAGE; Tlie Reform Against Nat- 
ure. New^ York : Charles Scribner, 1869. Pp. 184. 

JVoffi.— Dedicated to his wife. 

Article : Our Gospel a Gift to the Imagination. In Hours 
at Home (December, 1869), X. 159-172. Republished in 
Building Eras in Religion (1881). 

1870 

Address: The New Education. Delivered at the Annual 
Commencement of the Sheffield Scientific School, New 
Haven, July 18, 1870. In Hours at Home (September, 
1870), XI. 421-434. Republished in Building Eras in Re- 
ligion (1881). 

Note. — An argument for training in practical science. 

1871 
Articles : A Series on the subject of Prayer, appearing in The 
Advance (Chicago). 

1. Prayer Accorded as a Right of Petition. Thursday, 
April 13, 1871. Vol. IV., No. 189. 

2. Ends for which Prayer is Instituted. Thursday, 
April 27. IV., No. 191. 

3. By What in a Prayer Does it Prevail? Thursday, 
May 18. IV., No. 194. 

4. Prayer as Related to Second Causes. Thursday, 
June 8. IV., No. 197. 

5. Prayer as Related to God's Will. Thursday, June 
29. IV., No. 200. 

6. Prayer in the Name of Christ. Thursday, July 13. 
IV., No. 202. 

7. The Prayer of Faith. Thursday, August 3. IV., 
No. 205. 

8. Induement with Character through Pbayeb. 
Thursday, August 31. V., No. 209. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 461 

1871 

9. The Testing of Prayer. Thursday, October 3, 1872. 
VI., No. 265. 
Kote.— The ninth article was not printed for more than a year after it was written. 

Letter : The Conflagration. Letter from Dr. Bushnell, 
dated Hartford, November 1, 1871. In The Advance 
(Chicago). Thursday, November 16, 1871. V., No. 219. 

Letter : To Henry W. Longfellow. Dated Hartford, Decem- 
ber 28, 1871. First printed in Samuel Longfellow's Final 
Memorials of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1887), pp. 
178-179. See also the rearranged edition of Longfellow's 
Life (1891), III. 192-193. Again reprinted in Colonel T. 
W. Higginson's Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (American 
Men of Letters Series), 1902, pp. 245-246. 

Note.— LongfeWow^B The Divine Tragedy, forming the first part of the trilogy, 
Christus : A Mystery, appeared December 12, 1871. It was issued with 
misgivings on the poet's part as to its merit. Bushnell's letter was a timely 
and cordial expression of satisfaction with the poem. 

1872 

Speech: The Capitol Site. In The G our ant (Hartford), 
Monday, January 8, 1872. Extracts. IVz columns. 

^o^e.— Delivered Saturday night, January 6th, in Central Hall, Hartford. 

Book: SERMONS ON LIVING SUBJECTS. New York: 
Scribner, Armstrong & Co., 1872. Pp. 468. 
Contents : I. Mary, the Mother of Jesus. — Luke i. 28. II. 
Loving God is but Letting God Love Us. — 1 John iv. 16. 
III. Feet and Wings.— Ezekiel i. 24- IV. The Gospel of 
the Face. — 2 Corinthians iv. 6. V. The Completing of the 
Soul. — Colossians ii. 10. VI. The Immediate Knowledge 
of God. — 1 Corinthians xv. 34- VII. Religious Nature 
and Religious Character. — Acts xvii. 21. VIII. The Prop- 
erty Right We Are to Get in Souls. — 2 Corinthians xii. IJ^. 
IX. The Dissolving of Doubts. — Daniel v. 16. X. Christ 
Regenerates even the Desires. — Mark x. 35. XI. A Sin- 
gle Trial Better than Many. — Hehreivs ix. 27. XII. Self- 
examination Examined. — Psalms xxvi. 2. XIII. How to 
be a Christian in Trade. — Matthew xxv. 16. XIV. In and 
by Things Temporal are Given Things Eternal. — 2 Corin- 
thians iv. 8. XV. God Organizing in the Church His 
Eternal Society. — Helrews xii. 22-23. XVI. Routine Ob- 
servance Indispensable. — Matthew vi. 11. XVII. Our Ad- 
vantage in being Finite. — Hehrews ii. 7. XVIII. The 
Outside Saints. — Acts x. 34-35. XIX. Free to Amuse- 
ments, and too Free to Want Them. — 1 Corinthians x. 27. 
XX. The Military Discipline.— 2 Timothy ii. 3-4. XXL 
The Coronation of the Lamb. — Revelation xxii. 1. XXII. 
Our Relations to Christ in the Future Life. — 1 Corin- 
thians XV. 28. 



462 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

1874 
Book : FORGIVENESS AND L.A W, Grounded in Principles 
Interpreted by Human Analogies. New York : Scrib- 
ner, Armstrong & Co., 1874. Pp. 256. See 1877. The 
Vicarious Sacrifice. 

1875 
Paper : Inspikation by the Holy Spirit. 

Note.— This was left in MS. by Dr. Bushnell, designed as the beginning and out- 
line of a book. Published in The Spirit in Man (1903). 

1877 
Book : THE VICARIOUS SACRIFICE, Grounded in Princi- 
ples Interpreted by Human Analogies. New York : 
Charles Scribner, 1877. In two volumes. I., pp. 552 ; 
II., pp. 269. 

Note.— It had been the intention of the author to make the book Forgiveness 
and Law (1874), the second volume of Vicarious Sacrilice (1866), and in do- 
ing so to omit Parts III. and IV. of the earlier work ; not that there was any- 
thmg in those sections which he wished to retract, but because he considered 
the later book as a statement of more advanced thought along the same lines, 
and therefore as superseding parts of the earlier work. But when the edi- 
tors of his book undertook the task of carrying out his wishes, by advice of 
competent judges they decided it to be best to let each book stand as origi- 
nally written, merely making them two volumes of the same book. Under 
this plan some repetitions were unavoidable. On the other hand, some of 
the best passages in The Vicarious Sacrifice were saved to the reader, and the 
historic character of both books was preserved. 

Forgiveness and Law, made second volume of The Vicarious Sacrifice, is 
increased, pp. 259-269, by several supplementary notes left by Dr. Bushnell 
in MS. The secondary part of the title of the first volume (1866, q. u.) is 
now made to conform to the later wording—" Grounded in Principles of 
Universal Obligation" becomes "Grounded in Principles Interpreted by 
Human Analogies." The second volume has an editorial advertisement 
giving the facts of republication as stated below. 

A Uniform Edition of Dr. Bushnell's Writings was begun in 
1877 and completed in 1881. Dr. Bushnell had revised 
some of the books himself in preparation for this. He 
died February 17, 1876, and the work was completed by 
his daughters. This edition included : 

The Vicarious Sacrifice, 2 volumes ; Christian Nurture ; 
God in Christ ; Sermons for the New Life ; Sermons on 
Living Subjects; Christ and his Salvation (sermons); 
Nature and the Supernatural ; Three volumes under the 
heading of Literary Varieties, viz. : Work and Play, I. 
Moral Uses of Dark Things, II. Building Eras in Re- 
ligion (posthumous collection), III. 

1881 
Book : BUILDING ERAS IX RELIGION. Literary Varieties, 

III. New York : Charles Scribner's Sons, 1881. Pp. 459. 
Contents: I. Building Eras in Religion. II. The New 
Education. III. Common Schools. IV. The Christian 
Trinity a Practical Truth. V. Spiritual Economy of Re- 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 463 

vivals of Religion. VI. Pulpit Talent. VII. Training 
for the Pulpit Manward. VIII. Our Gospel a Gift to the 
Imagination. IX. Popular Government by Divine Right. 
X. Our Obligations to the Dead. XI. Letter to his Holi- 
ness, Pope Gregory XVI. XII. Christian Comprehensive- 
ness. 
Note.—This volume was made up after Dr. Bushnell's death and was composed 

of fugitive articles, many of them left by Dr. Bushnell under the heading 

Reliquice. See 1877. 

1903 
Book : THE SPIRIT IN MAN. Sermons and Selections. 

New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1903. Pp. 473. 
Contents: Part I. Inspiration by the Holy Spirit. Part 
11. Sermons (eleven). Part III. Selections from Ser- 
mons (twenty-seven). Part IV. Ceremony of Marriage; 
A Group of Letters ; Aphorisms ; Bibliography. 

Note. — The volume takes its title from a sermon first published in Sermons for 

the New Life (1858). 

'"'^hree volumes by Horace Bushnell are to be re-issued in 1903 
by Charles Scribner's Sons : 

1. Nature and the Supernatural. Printed from new 
plates, with the omission of the " Preface to the Second 
Edition " which was written in May, 1864. See 1858. 

2. Sermons for the New Life. Carefully revised and 
printed from new plates. See 1858. 

3. Work and Play. Vol. I. of Literary Varieties. Care- 
fully revised and printed from new plates. See 1864.] 

Part II. 

CONTROVERSIAL WRITINGS ADDRESSED TO OR 
WRITTEN CONCERNING HORACE BUSHNELL 

1839 

A Review of the Rev. Horace Bushnell's Discourse on 
THE Slavery Question, delivered in the North Church, 
Hartford, January 10, 1839. By Francis Gillette. Hart- 
ford. Pp. 44. 

1843 

A Letter to Dr. Bushnell, of Hartford, on the Rationalis- 
tic, Socinian, and Infidel Tendency of Certain Passages in 
His Address before the Alumni of Yale College. Signed 
" Catholicus." Hartford : November, 1843. Pp. 23. 

1847 

Letter to Rev. Dr. Bushnell on Christian Nurture, by 

B. Tyler. Dated East Windsor Hill, June 7, 1847. Pp. 22. 

JVofe.— This letter was read at the annual meeting of the North Association of 

Hartford County. " The brethren expressed their unanimous approbation 

of it and requested that it might be published." 



464 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

1847 
Review of Dr. Bushnell's Discourses on Christian Nur- 
ture. Extracted by permission from The Princeton Re- 
view. New York : 1847. Pp. 30. Ascribed to Professor 
C. Hodge, of Princeton, N. J. 

1848 
[Seven] Letters to the Rev. Horace Bushnell, D.D. Con- 
taining strictures on his book entitled " Views of Chris- 
tian Nurture, and Subjects adjacent thereto." By Bennet 
Tyler, D.D., President and Professor of Christian Theology 
in the Theological Institute of Connecticut. Hartford : 

1848. Pp. 80. 

^o«e,— The pamphlet is dated at East W^indsor Hill, March 20, 1848. 

1849 
What Does Dr. Bushnell Mean? By Omicron. Hartford: 

1849. Pp. 28. From The New York Evangelist, and 
ascribed to Rev. Dr. C. A. Goodrich, of New Haven. 

Review of Dr. Bushnell's Theories of the Incarnation 
AND Atonement. (A Supplement to " Theophany.") By 
Robert Turnbull, Pastor of the First Baptist Church, 
Hartford. Hartford: 1849. Pp. 77. 

Notice of " God in Christ." In The New Englander (May, 
1849), VII. 324-326. Ascribed to Leonard Bacon, D.D., 
of New Haven, Conn. 

Review of " God in Christ." In The Christian Observatory 
(Boston, June, 1849), III. 241-300. Said to be the joint 
work of the editors, Rev. Drs. Adams, Albro and Beecher, 
and Messrs. Kirk, McClure, Stearns and Thompson. 

Review of Dr. Bushnell's " God in Christ." By Enoch 
Pond, D.D. Bangor : 1849. Pp. 128. 

Review of Dr. Bushnell's Dissertation on Language. 
In The Theological and Literary Journal (New York, July, 
1849), II. 61-131. By the editor, David N. Lord. 

Contributions of CC. Now declared in full as Criticus 
Criticorum. [By Amos S. Chesebrough, D.D.] Hartford : 
Pp. 60. 

Note.— Ten letters written in defence of Bushnell, six of which appeared first in 
The New England Religious Herald for July 7, 14, 21, 28, August 4 and 18, 
1849. As the editor of the paper was unwilling to continue them, they were 
published by request in pamphlet form. 

1850 
Remonstrance and Complaint of the Association of Fair- 
field West to the Hartford Central Association. 
Together with the Reply of the Hartford Central Associa- 
tion. New York: March, 1850. Pp. 35. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 465 

1850 

MlNtJTES OF THE GENERAL ASSOCIATION OF CONNECTICUT AT 

THEIR Meeting in Litchfield, June, 1850. New Haven : 
1850. [Including Declaration disclaiming responsibility for 
the doctrines of the Book, " God in Christ," pp. 17-18.] 

1852 
Appeal of the Association of Fairfield West to the As- 
sociated Ministers connected with the General As- 
sociation OF Connecticut. New York: 1852. Pp. 95. 

1854 
A Protest of the Pastoral Union to the Pastors and 
Churches of Connecticut. Adopted at a meeting held 
in Wethersfield, Conn., October 24 and 25, 1854. Pp. 7. 

1866 
Remarks on Dr. Bushnell's " Vicarious Sacrifice." By 

Rev. W. W. Andrews. Hartford: 1866. Pp. 81. 
Review of Dr. Bushnell on " The Vicarious Sacrifice." 

By Professor Noah Porter, Yale College. In The New 

Englander (April, 1866), XXV. 228-282. Cp. XXV. 160- 

162. January, 1866. 

1879 
Concerning a Recent Chapter of Ecclesiastical History. 
In The New Englander (September, 1879), XXXVIII. 
701-712. By Leonard Bacon, D.D. [A letter first written 
to Mrs. Horace Bushnell for use in the Life and Letters of 
H. B. (pp. 201, 245, 246), dated August 16, 1878.] 

1896 
The Hartford Central Association and the Bushnell 
Controversy. An Historical Address given before the 
Hartford Central Association, February 3, 1896. By 
Edwin Pond Parker, D.D., Pastor of the Second Church 
of Hartford. Published by the Association. Hartford : 
1896. Pp. 29. 

1902 
Bushnell Centenary. Minutes of the General Association 
of Connecticut at the One Hundred and Ninety-third An- 
nual Meeting Held in Hartford, June 17, 18, 1902. Hart- 
ford : 1902. Pp. 121. 

The Addresses in this pamphlet are: [1] Bushnell as 
A Religious Leader. By Williston Walker. Pp. 15-34. 
[2] The Secret of Bushnell. By Theodore T. Munger. 
Pp. 35-46. [3] Reminiscences of the Bushnell Con- 
troversy. By Amos S. Chesebrough. Pp. 47-57. [4] 
Bushnell the Citizen. By Charles Hopkins Clark. 



466 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Pp. 58-69. [5] Personal Reminiscences. By Joseph 
H. Twichell. Pp. 70-85. [6] Horace Bushnell — 
Christian Prophet. By Edwin Pond Parker. Pp. 86- 
99. [7] Bushnell and Christian Nurture : the 
Doctrine. By Charles E. McKinley. Pp. 100-110. 
[8] Bushnell and Christian Nurture : the Mode. 
By William J. Mutch. Pp. 111-121. 
^ote.— Eev. W. W. Kanney was chairman of the Committee of Publication. 



Historical and Official Statements and Reports of the 
Bushnell Case from The New England Religious 
Herald. 

Note— The Religious Herald was a paper, whose first number was published in 
Hartford, February 1, 1843. Beginning as a bi-weekly, it was changed to a 
weekly from November 29, 1843. In January, 1847, it changed its title and 
became The New Eiigland Religious Herald. Its publication ceased in 1899. 
Its early numbers were contemporaneous with the controversy about the 
writings of Dr. Bushnell, and as it was situated at the storm-centre it contains 
more details of the controversy than can be found in any other publication. 
The files of the paper are in the possession of D. S. Moseley, son of the original 
proprietor, and are to be found at his office, 386 Asylxim Street, Hartford. 

VOL. v., 1847. 
The Hartford North Consociation, January 9, 16, 23, 30, Feb- 
ruary 6. 

VOL. VI., 1848. 
The General Association of Connecticut, June 17. 

VOL. VII., 1849. 
The Hartford Central Association, August 12, October 27, 

November 17. 
Reply of the Minority, J. Hawes and W. Clarke, December 29. 

VOL. VIII., 1850. 

Reply of the Minority, concluded, January 12. 

Letter addressed to the Members of Hartford Central Asso- 
ciation, Signed by Shubael Bartlett, Bennet Tyler and 
fifteen others, February 16. 

Discussion of the above, March 9, 16, 23, 30. 

New Haven West Association, May 9. 

Response of Hartford North Association to the communication 
addressed to them by the Association of Fairfield West, 
May 18. 

Hartford Central Association, June 8. 

Windham Association, Thompson, June 15. 

Eastern Association of New Haven County, North Haven, 
June 15. 

Middlesex Association, Deep River, June 15. 

Action of Litchfield South Association, June 15. 

Association of Tolland, June 15. 

Meeting of the General Association of Connecticut, June 29. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 467 

VOL. IX., 1851. 
The Association of Fairfield West to Hartford Central Asso- 
ciation, June 14. 
Letter from J. Hawes and W. Clarke, June 21. 
General Association, June 28. 

VOL. X., 1852. 
Remonstrance from Dr. Bushnell to General Association of 

Connecticut, June 19. 
Discussion of above, June 26. 
North Church of Hartford withdraws from North Consociation 

of Hartford County, July 3. 
The General Association discussed, July 3. 

VOL. XL, 1853. 

Memorial of Hartford Central Association to the General Asso- 
ciation, to assemble at Waterbury, June 23. 
Fairfield West Association, June 23. 

The General Association of Connecticut at Waterbury, June 30. 
Reply to the Memorial of Hartford Central Association, July 21. 
The " Mysterious " Convention, December 15. 

VOL. XII., 1854. 
Proposed Congregational Convention, January 5. 
Circular to the Convention, January 12. 
Minutes of Proceedings of the Convention of December 5, 1853, 

January 12. 
The New London Convention, January 19, 26, February 2, 

February 9, March 12. 
Action of the New London Consociation as to the proposed New 

London Convention, March 23. 
The New London Convention again, March 30, May 18, 25. 
Letter from Dr. Bushnell to Dr. Hawes, June 1. 
Reply of Dr. Hawes to Dr. Bushnell, June 1. 
Fairfield West Association and Dr. Hawes, June 15. 
The General Association, June 15. 
The General Association, .June 29. 
Proceedings of the General Association and remarks of Dr. 

Bushnell, July 6. 

Contemporary Criticism and CoivrTRGVERSY about the 
Books of Dr. Bushnell. 
On August 16, 1843, Dr. Bushnell delivered before the So- 
ciety of Alumni of Yale College an oration on The Moral 
Tendencies and Results of Human History (later entitled 
The Growth of Law. See Work and Play, pp. 78-123). Dis- 
cussion aroused by this address is to be found in The New 
England Religious Herald under the following dates : 
Vol. I., 1843. September 20, December 6, 20, 27. 
Vol. II., 1844. January 3, 10, 24, 31; February 7, 14; 
March 13, 



468 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

In 1847 Dr. Bushnell wrote, and the Massachusetts Sabbath 
School Society published, a small book called Discourses on 
Christian Nurture, which was soon suppressed by that Society. 
Controversy concerning it as reported in The 'New England 
Religious Herald was under the following dates : 
Vol. v., 1847. August 7, 14, 28 ; September 4, 11, 18 ; October 

16 ; November 6, 20 ; December 4. 
Vol. VI., 1848. March 25; April 1, 15, 29; May 6, 20, 27; 
June 3, 10, 17 ; July 1, 8, 15, 22. 
In the summer of 1848 Dr. Bushnell delivered at Cambridge, 
Andover, and New Haven the doctrinal discourses which, early 
in the following year, were collected and published in the book 
God in Christ. Controversy on the discourses and the book, 
as reported in The New England Religious Herald, may be 
found under the following dates : 

Vol. VI., 1848. July 29; August 26; September 2, 16; Oc- 
tober 21, 28 ; November 4, 11, 18. 
Vol. VII., 1849. March 10; April 7, 14, 28; May 5, 12, 19, 
26 ; June 2, 9, 23 ; July 7, 28 ; August 4, 18 ; October 27 ; 
November 17, 24 ; December 1, 8, 15, 22, 29. 
Henceforth, during the years 1850, 1851, 1852, 1853, 1854, 
the controversy related not only to the books of Dr. Bushnell 
(of which another, Christ in Theology, was published in 
1851), but to the ecclesiastical measures designed to silence 
him, to his character and to the smallest of his acts and 
utterances. In those five years there were few numbers of 
The New England Religious Herald which did not contribute 
to the discussion. Additional bibliographical material taken 
from The New England Religious Herald has been deposited 
in the Watkinson Library, Hartford, in the Yale University 
Library, New Haven, in Harvard College Library, Cambridge, 
Mass., and in the Boston Public Library. 



Part III. 

WRITINGS ABOUT HORACE BUSHNELL 

A. — Memoirs, 

lilFK AND LETTERS OP HORACE BUSH1VEI.L,. New 

York : Harper & Brothers, 1880. Pp. 579. Charles Scrib- 
ner's Sons, 1903. [Prepared by Mary Bushnell Cheney, 
Rev. Dr. E. P. Parker and Frances Louisa Bushnell, with 
contributions from Bishop Thomas M. Clark, Rev. Dr. 
Leonard Bacon, Rev. Dr. C. A. Bartol, Rev. Amos S. 
Chesebrough. Mrs. Bushnell, Rev. George Bushnell, Rev. 
Dr. Robert McEwen and others.] 

JTofe.— The new edition (1903^ of this book is slightly revised, and contains, be- 
sides portraits, several illustrations of places associated with Horace Bush- 
nell's life. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 469 

PREACHER A.ND A**^ 

miUan Oompatiy, lf»^-j^;\., pp. 169-192.) 

on Horace BusUneU .s Mo. • ^ presentation 

]SIew York : Obaunce^ 

nell, II. 120-127. l^lTERATrRE. 

^ mttw -WORI^D'S ^*^'*^ioQ7 VII. 2909- 

TheAphokismsokBushhell. The O . 

June 7, 1902. wnKiCE Btishnell. Before 

^n„KESSES:THEC-B^.^^^^ 

tte Twentieth Centtiy ^^^^^^ "^^ J^^'Vm. BUSH- 

• ^St Printed in^the BepoU oJ ft ^^^^^^^ (^„,„,t 30, 

tl02nxU ^^^ ^,,_, ,„.e.« ..iiar in content. 



470 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

C. — Selected References. 

BOOKS. 

YALS liECTURES. By Nathaniel J. Burton, D.D. Edited 
by Richard E. Burton. New York : C. L. Webster & Co., 
1888. Horace Bushnell. An address delivered on the 

OCCASION OF the UNVEILING OF A BUSHNELL MEMORIAL 

Tablet in Park Church, Hartford, November 24, 1878. 
415-429. 
PRIIVCIP1.ES AND PORTRAITS. By C. A. Bartol, D.D. 
Boston : Roberts Brothers, 1880. Bushnell the Theolo- 
gian. 366-385. 

THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF HARTFORD COUNTY, 

CONN. Boston: Edward L. Osgood, 1880. 2 vols. The 
North Congregational Church. By N. J. Burton, D.D. 

I. 390. 

AMERICAN LiANDS AND LETTERS. By Donald G. 

Mitchell. New York : Charles Scribner's Sons, 1899. 
Horace Bushnell. 75-95. 

MY PORTFOLIO. By Austin Phelps, D.D. New York: 
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1882. A Vacation with Dr. 
Bushnell. 219-229. 

TiroRKS OF ORESTES A. BROWNSON. Edited by Henry 
F. Brownson. Detroit: T. Nourse, 1884. Bushnell's 
Discourses. [God in Christ.] VII. 1-116. From Brown- 
son's Quarterly Review for 1849-1851. 

LIFE OF PHILLIPS BROOKS. By Rev. Alexander V. G. 
Allen. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1900. 2 vols. 

II. 262. 

Note.— This is a letter about Dr. Bushnell from the mother of Bishop Brooks to 
her son, dated November 27, 1864, with comment by Mr. Allen, in which he 
makes a mistake in saying that Horace Bushnell " withdrew the book in 
which he had questioned the vicariousness of the great sacrifice." The book 
did not question that truth, but affirmed it. It was not withdrawn, and the 
later modification of the author's views on the subject was such as arose 
from carrying further the same method of treatment. 

A LIBRARY OF THE "WORLD'S BEST ORATIONS* Da- 
vid J. Brewer, Editor. St. Louis: Fred P. Kaiser, 1900. 
Selection, The Dignity of Human Nature, etc. III. 

825-829. 

PERIODICALS. 

The North American Review (January, 1838), XL VI. 301-302. 
[Notice of] An Oration by Mr. Horace Bushnell, pro- 
nounced before the Society of Phi Beta Kappa at New 
Haven, August 15, 1837. 

The Penn Monthly (April, 1876), VII. 287-297. Dr. Horace 
Bushnell. By John Dyer, 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 471 

The New Englander (January, 1877), XXXVI. 152-169. By 
President Noah Porter. Horace Bushnell. A Memorial 
Sermon Preached in the Chapel of Yale College, Sunday, 
March 26, 1876. [Isaiah vi. 5-8.] Reprinted in pamphlet. 
Pp. 18. 

The Contemporary Review, London (August, 1879), XXXV. 
815-831. An American Divine : Horace Bushnell, D.D. 
By Rev. G. S. Drew. 

Unitij, Chicago (July and August, 1880), V., Nos. 11 and 12, 
158-159, 177-179. Dr. Bushnell. By Rev. John C. Learned. 

Appleton's Journal (September, 1880), N. S. IX. 277-282. 
Two American Divines: Dr. Bushnell and Dr. Muhlen- 
berg. 

The Unitarian Review (September, 1880), XIV. 236-248. Dr. 
Horace Bushnell and the Quandaries of Our Theology. 
By C. A, Bartol, D.D. 

The New Englander (December, 1880), XXXIX. 803-827, and 
(January, 1881) XL. 1-39. Horace Bushnell. By Rev. 
Henry M. Goodwin, of Olivet, Mich. 

The International Review, New York (January, 1881), X. 13- 
25. Horace Bushnell. By George P. Fisher, D.D. 

The Nation, New York (August 19, 1880), XXXI. 136-137. 
Dr. Bushnell. By C. C. Nott. 

The Andover Review (August, 1886), VI. 113-130. The Theo- 
logical Opinions of Horace Bushnell as related to his 
Character and Christian Experience. By Amos S. Chese- 
brough, D.D. 

The Sunday School Times. August 5 and 12, September 2, 
1899. Reminiscences of Dr. Bushnell. By Rev. Henry 
Clay Trumbull. 

The Congregationalist. September 21, 1899. 

The Nation, New York (October 10, 1899), LXIX. 318, 
Munger's Bushnell. By Rev. J. W. Chadwick. 

The Outlook, New York (October 14, 1899), LXIII. 413-415. 
The Life of Horace Bushnell. By Rev. Dr. Lyman Ab- 
bott. 

Great Thoughts. London. November, 1899. 260-262. [Re- 
view of Dr. Munger's Life of Horace Bushnell.] 

The Neiv England Magazine (December, 1899), N. S. XXI. 
505-516. Editor's Table. By Edwin D. Mead. [Remarks 
on Dr. Bushnell and his works.] 

The Independent, New York (.January 11, 1900), CLII. 116- 
120. Studio Talks with Dr. Horace Bushnell. By F. B. 
Carpenter. 



472 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

The Atlantic Monthly, Boston (March, 1900), LXXXV. 415- 
425. Horace Bushnell. By Walter Allen. 

The Outlook, New York (June 2, 1900), LXV. 261-265. Dr. 
Bushnell in the Woods. By Rev. Joseph H. Twichell. 

The Yale Alumni Weekly, Bicentennial Number, New Haven. 
October 20, 1901. Address: Theologians of Yale. By 
George P. Fisher, D.D. P. 148. Address : The Relations 
of Yale to Letters and Science. By President Daniel O. 
Oilman, of the Carnegie Institute for Original Research. 
P. 165. (Also privately printed in Baltimore. Pp. 43.) 

The American Journal of Theology (January, 1902), VI. 35-56. 
Horace Bushnell and Albrecht Ritschl : A Comparison. By 
Professor George B. Stevens, of Yale Divinity School. 

The Brooklyn Eagle. June 2, 1902. [Report of centennial ob- 
servance at Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, N. Y., of Dr. 
Bushnell's birth. With addresses by E. P. Parker, D.D., 
on Bushnell as a Prophet, and by S. D. McConnell, D.D., 
and H. P. Dewey, D.D.] 

The Congregationalist. June 7, 1902. A Bushnell number, 
illustrated, containing the following articles : The Apho- 
risms of Bushnell, by T. T. Munger, D.D. ; My Week with 
Bushnell, by Reuen Thomas, D.D. ; Personal Indebtedness 
to Bushnell, a Symposium ; Dr. Bushnell's Marks in Hart- 
ford, by E. P. Parker, D.D. ; A Word from Another Hart- 
ford Disciple, by Rev. Joseph H. Twichell ; Horace Bush- 
nell's Influence in England, by Rev. J. Morgan Gibbon ; 
Recollections of a Former Parishioner, by Rev. N, H. 
Egleston ; A Preacher's Preacher, by Rev. W. V. Kelley. 

The Methodist Review, New York (September-October, 1902), 
LXXXIV. 692-707. Dr. Bushnell's Theology. By Pro- 
fessor George B. Stevens. [First delivered at exercises 
commemorative of Dr. Bushnell. Yale Divinity School 
Commencement, May, 1902.] 



IN MEMORIAM 

Funeral services for Dr. Bushnell in Park Church, Hart- 
ford. Addresses by N. J. Burton, D.D., and Rev. Joseph H. 
Twichell, reported in Hartford Daily Courant, February 20, 
1876. 

Obituaries by E. P. Parker, D.D., and Charles Hopkins 
Clark, in Hartford Daily Courant, February 18, 1876 ; by Rev. 
W. L. Gage in Hartford Evening Post, February 17, 1876; 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 473 

by Charles Dudley Warner in Hartford Courant, April 11, 
1876, dated Munich, March 20, 1876; by Bishop Clark in 
Providence Journal, probably February 21, 1876. Two sonnets 
by Rev. Henry M. Goodwin in The Advance, Chicago, March 
2, 1876. Addresses by C. A. Bartol, D.D., in his own church, 
Boston, February 27, reported in Boston Daily Advertiser, 
February 28, 1876, as Tribute to Horace Bushnell and Char- 
lotte Cushman ; by President Noah Porter in Yale College 
Chapel, March 26, 1876, printed in The JSlew Englander (see 
page 470 of this Bibliography) ; by E. P. Parker, D.D., in his 
own church, February 8, 1885, printed in Hartford Daily 
Courant, February 24, 1885. 






^t- 



:^ 






% 







\' ^^ \ ' /, ^ 




r- 








^ /, 





,0- 



0> 






<,o 



< 



"-^A v^^ 







■^ - 






1 



^' ^, ''*r 


,_j. ■ 


^ u (, '/- 8 


1 \ ' 


^ "^ / ''\. c:^ 






.^^ 


■^^ ^'-^5/ * .^^'"^ 


\ 








Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: April 2006 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 

1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township. PA 16066 
(724)779-2111 













»;\, 



%.^^' 



</>.\^ 






^..j<i 




.>' 



